2025 Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Award Recipients
The Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University has announced the recipients of its 2025 Research Incubation Awards. Five new and renewed research projects received over $600,000 in funding to support research on cybersecurity operations, AI infrastructure security, hypervisor virtualization and security, and multi-modal language models.
This year’s projects targeted the following areas:
Cybersecurity and Threat Detection
Improving security operations, threat modeling, and vulnerability analysis through knowledge graphs and advanced techniques.
Virtualization Technologies and Infrastructure
Exploration of hypervisorless virtualization, hypervisor security, and enhancing performance in virtualized AI and cloud environments.
AI Model Optimization and Scalability
Research on optimizing multi-modal large language models, focusing on training efficiency, federated learning, and downstream task integration.
Performance and Resilience in Cloud-Based Systems
Investigating trade-offs between functionality and security in virtualized environments and hardware-software interactions in high-performance systems.
Data Privacy and Protection in AI and Virtualization
Addressing trust and security challenges in AI model training and confidential computing aspects of virtualization.
Since 2017, Red Hat has been dedicated to advancing research and education at Boston University in areas such as cloud computing, machine learning, automation, and operating systems, with this commitment growing stronger each year through the efforts of Red Hat Research. The Red Hat Collaboratory, located within BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, promotes partnerships that blend academic research with open-source innovation’s transformative potential.
Red Hat’s commitment to open-source principles also supports the potency of the Collaboratory model. “The Collaboratory presents an ideal academic-industrial partnership, where BU researchers can ground their work in the significant experience of Red Hat engineers while continuing to do fundamental research of interest to the broader community,” said BU professor and Collaboratory co-director Ari Trachtenberg. “Red Hat’s focus on making its work open-source and available makes it a natural—and distinctive—industrial partner in this endeavor.”
Heidi Dempsey, Collaboratory co-director, said “We learn a lot by working with researchers who are on the cutting edge of performance, privacy, and sustainability efforts. By bringing these new results and capabilities into Red Hat, we can have a stronger impact on products and improve the environment for cloud users. The sum is truly greater than the parts.”
These are the principal investigators (PIs) and projects receiving funds:
Speculative projects:
- Ajay Joshi, What is all the Fuzz? Investigating and Improving “Functionality vs Security” Trade-offs for Virtualized AI Infrastructure
- Renato Mancuso, Foundations of Hypervisorless Virtualization Technology in High-performance Systems
Small projects:
- Manuel Egele, HySe – Hypervisor Security through Component-Wise Fuzzing
- Eshed Ohn-Bar, Optimizing Multi-Modal Large Language Models Systems
- David Starobinski, Improving Cyber Security Operations using Knowledge Graphs
All software developed by these projects will be available under an open-source license, and all results will be made publicly available. Red Hat Research regularly updates on Collaboratory progress and announces engagement opportunities through Red Hat Research Quarterly Magazine, its searchable project database, blog, newsfeed, and live in-person and virtual events. Contact Jen Stacy, Senior Project Manager with Red Hat Research, for more information.