National Science Foundation honors KU Engineering researcher for protecting public trust in global supply chains

LAWRENCE — Trust is the foundation of society. People depend on it every day, often without even realizing it.

People trust that their medicine matches the label, that food in the supply chain stays safe and that computer chips in important systems are genuine and secure.

As products move across suppliers, organizations, locations and databases, it becomes harder to verify their authenticity. When fake or tampered goods slip into the mix, the consequences can be dangerous.

To address this problem, University of Kansas researcher Sumaiya Shomaji is building a secure, high-tech tracking system powered by artificial intelligence. Her project, AuthenTrack, recently earned her a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award.

Shomaji, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is designing AuthenTrack as a fast, impossible-to-fake and secure framework for verifying identities and protecting global supply chains.

“Today, products move through complex supply chains involving multiple organizations and locations,” Shomaji said. “Ensuring these products are authentic and have not been counterfeited, tampered with or diverted requires reliable tracking and identity verification throughout their journey.”

Although tracking technologies like AI and blockchain already exist, current systems often force companies to make trade-offs. AI is good at detecting anomalies and spotting fakes, but it requires massive computer power. Blockchain offers excellent security and traceability, but it slows down when processing millions of items.

“Through AuthenTrack, my team and I are developing a secure and scalable framework that enables efficient tracking and authentication across large-scale systems,” Shomaji said. “Our goal is to create a solution that is difficult to spoof, storage-efficient, fast to query and adaptable across a wide range of applications.”

Tracking billions of items at once makes things even more difficult. Medicines, microelectronic chips and human biometrics all require different methods for representing identity and handling real-world variability.

“Our goal is to bridge that gap through a unified framework,” she said. “Each research question is an important piece of the puzzle, and together they will help us move toward a scalable and trustworthy solution across multiple domains.”

With NSF funding, Shomaji’s team can test and improve AuthenTrack in many different fields over the next several years, bringing the technology closer to real-world deployment.

Shomaji’s NSF CAREER award is one of the top honors for early-career faculty. It supports researchers who show strong promise in both research and teaching.

“Receiving the NSF CAREER award is both an honor and a source of encouragement at this stage of my career,” Shomaji said. “It validates the vision behind my research and reflects confidence in the potential impact of our work. I am excited to explore these challenges and adapt the framework to diverse real-world applications.”

Shomaji credited her research team for this achievement and said it demonstrates the School of Engineering’s larger mission to improve communities everywhere.

“Receiving this award reflects the strong research environment and highlights KU’s commitment to innovative research that addresses real-world challenges,” Shomaji said. “Through projects like AuthenTrack, KU is contributing to solutions that improve the security, reliability and trustworthiness of systems that society relies on every day.”

Educating future researchers is a key component of the CAREER award. Shomaji is doing this by bringing this cutting-edge work directly into her university classrooms and showing how foundational computer science concepts can solve real-world challenges.

In her biometric authentication course, students learn how security challenges multiply at scale. In her data structures and algorithms class, they see how big data affects speed and storage. The project will also share open-source tools, benchmarks and datasets designed to make the work more accessible to students and the broader research community.

That reflects the driving force behind Shomaji’s passion. Her work, while technical and systems-oriented, is driven by a desire to protect people.

“I have always been interested in working on problems that have a direct impact on people and society,” she said. “What continues to motivate me is the opportunity to combine ideas from multiple disciplines to solve real-world problems and develop technologies that are both scientifically meaningful and societally impactful. Ultimately, the goal of research is not just to advance technology, but to create tools and systems that improve people’s lives.”