Saia has received several NSF awards, including a Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace award that aims to protect computer systems from a type of attack called “Sybil”. In this attack an adversary pretends to be multiple users in a dynamic system to take more resources or disrupt the system. Saia’s research goal is to create defenses against this type of attack in various settings, including peer-to-peer networks, client-server systems, and e-commerce. All Sybil defenses make use of resource-burning techniques like "proof-of-work". But crucially, Saia's work focuses on techniques where the defender consumes a number of resources that is probably less than the attacker. 

Saia is also a co-principal investigator in a National Robotics Initiative award to develop novel bio-inspired software and drones to measure and sample volcanic gases. Saia and his student Abir Islam along with colleague Varsha Dani created the first algorithm for circumnavigating an unknown plume with two drones that turn and travel amounts that are both asymptotically optimal. Their algorithmic analysis uses tools from both Real Analysis and Topology. Their paper on this result won the "Best Student Paper" award at SIROCCO '22. The algorithm is currently being field-tested and is expected to be used to measure plumes from an active volcano in Poas, Costa Rica. The data collected will help scientists better understand the course of volcanic eruptions. 

Dr. Saia's exceptional contributions earned him an NSF CAREER award for his research on "Foundations for Attack-Resistant Collaborative Peer-to-Peer Systems". This research project had two significant areas of achievement. The first one was the development of an efficient algorithm for a Byzantine Agreement in a difficult scenario. A Byzantine agreement is a problem in computer science where a group of computers need to agree on a single choice, even if some computers are trying to disrupt this agreement secretly. This is important because it has applications in various fields, including airplane systems, databases, and cloud computing. The research also produced an algorithm that reduced the number of messages sent by each computer, making it more scalable. Previous approaches required a lot more communication. 

Dr. Saia acknowledges the pivotal role that NSF funds have played in propelling his research career. He expressed, "The NSF Career award was a game-changer for me. First, the process of writing and receiving feedback on the grant proposal helped me hone my research goals and better motivate those goals. Second, the grant money provided me with the critical resources - students, summer support, travel funds, equipment - I needed to achieve these goals. Finally, the prestige of the award helped open doors to collaborations and really helped launch my research career into the overlap between distributed computing and cybersecurity. I'm truly grateful for the opportunities that NSF has brought."