Remember attending high school and being excited to go to the homecoming football game or prom with your best friends? Anurag Akkiraju — a recent high school graduate and intern in FIU’s Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab —was excited for all this, but was mainly excited because at 17, and while still in high school, Akkiraju had his first paper published.
In October 2017, his paper titled “Cybergrenade: Automated Exploitation of Local Network Machines via Single Board Computers” was published on IEEE Xplore, a digital library and research database filled with journal articles, conference proceedings, ebooks, and educational courses — all related to computer science, electrical engineering and STEM fields. It was featured at the 2017 Networking and Systems Research Workshop held in Orlando, Florida, part of the 14th IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc Sensor Systems.
In 6th grade, the Miami native learned the fundamentals and language of computer programming. Seeing that Akkiraju had a strong interest in mathematics and science, Akkiraju’s father signed him up to take online courses at the Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, where he acquired the basics of computer programming.
As his interest in computer science continued to increase, Akkiraju chose the pre-engineering track at American Heritage High School in Plantation, Florida. American Heritage was ranked the No. 1 high school in Florida with 134 nationally recognized scholars in 2015 and ranked 12th out of 22,000 high schools in the nation, according to Newsweek.
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