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March of the ants

Can ants help make algorithms for safer computing? Yuhong Liu, assistant professor of computer engineering, thinks so.
25 Nov 2019
by Heidi Williams

Ants find the shortest path from food to the nest by sending scouts along random trails. When the scout ant with the most efficient path returns, others follow that scout’s scent, adding their scents to the path and making it easier to find.

Oddly enough, this creepy, crawly pathfinding might hold the key to cloud security.

That is what Yuhong Liu, assistant professor of computer engineering, is working with her students to prove.

Using this follow-the-leader strategy, Liu along with colleagues from California State University, East Bay developed an algorithm to make cloud-computing more efficient and secure.