Herbert G. Kayser Professor of Computer Science Zhigang Zhu, along with four other CCNY faculty, received the 2025 Google Cybersecurity grant for the research project “On-the-Go Privacy: Real-Time and Predictive Visual Privacy Alerts for Smartphone or Wearable Systems.”
CCNY and other CUNY researchers will share the $3M award to the university. Zhu serves as the co-principal investigator to the principal investigator, BMCC Computer Science Professor and Deputy Chairperson Hao Tang, who was once his PhD student.
Zhu joined CCNY’s faculty in 2002 as an associate professor specializing in computer vision, robotics and surveillance, and expanded his research after reflecting on how these fields relate to assistive technology.
“Later on in my sabbatical, I felt like helping people who really have challenges, including the people who are blind or have low vision is really something we want to do.”
Since 2011, Zhu has worked towards developing models to help visually impaired people with daily tasks. This includes, but is not limited to, recognizing objects, navigating sidewalks, and, most recently, concealing sensitive materials.
“We also want to provide the services to people with safety, security, and privacy in mind.”
He has been colla
borating with Lighthouse Guild and Visions, two vision loss nonprofits specializing in assistive technology, to help with volunteer testers. For this project, low vision individuals were given a phone app and asked to document everyday objects. Subjects tested the apps in different environments, such as museums and storefronts, and provided feedback to researchers.
“They capture images and video for us, so we crop images that we build up as a data set. It’s a collaboration— not just through research, but it’s also a user study.”
Popular applications like Be My Eyes rely on volunteers to help users identify their surroundings in real time, but, as Zhu points out, this can be a security risk, as users might reveal sensitive information such as credit card numbers, banknotes, and other private items to others. Zhu’s study instead collects the images to build up a data set to detect and blur out sensitive materials before they are shared.
For Zhu, the research has been incredibly satisfying– not only academically, but emotionally as well.
“It is really rewarding… I kind of have that drive to really help people who have challenges. You know, everybody probably has friends or relatives, who have different kinds of issues, particularly visual problems.”
Currently, Zhu is experimenting with efficient ways to protect blind users from sharing private items on the app. He is considering enabling a pop-up notification to remind users about the potential of sending a sensitive object or automatically filtering out the materials from the live camera.
Google, in partnership with CUNY, Columbia University, New York University, and Cornell University, introduced the Google Cyber NYC Institutional Research Program in 2021. The same year, the Google Cybersecurity Grant was launched as part of an initiative to advance cybersecurity research.
In addition to Zhu, CCNY Professors Nelly Fazio and Tushar Jois were awarded for their projects on safe mesh messaging for large protests, Yingli Tian for face detection privacy, and Tushar Jois and Rosario Gennaro for coding confidentially with virtual machines.
Mia Euceda is an alumna of Baruch College, where they studied journalism and served as an editor for The Ticker newspaper and Refract Magazine. Their work has been published in The New York Review of Books and Treble Zine.