I.1 Research and Education Leadership/Administration

Cyber Security Research and Education Institute: I joined UTD in October 2004 as a Professor of Computer Science and the Founding Executive Director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI). During my almost 20 years at UTD, I have established and lead a strong research and education program in cyber security integrated with data science which has grown from one person in 2004 (myself) to around 15 core professors and around 20 affiliated professors conducting research in data security and privacy, machine learning for malware detection, adversarial machine learning, software and language security, secure networks, secure systems and forensics, hardware security, cryptography, control systems security, secure software engineering, security applications, behavioral aspects of security, and cyber security policy. I led CSI until Fall 2021 and since then have served as its chief strategist.

Grants and Contracts: The team has generated close to $100 million in research funding mainly from agencies such as NSF, AFOSR, IARPA, DARPA, NGA, NASA, ONR, ARO, ARL, DHS, NIH, NIST, and USDOT as well as multiple corporations and research labs including Raytheon, IBM (multiple faculty awards), VMware, Intel, HP, Sandia, MITRE, Lockheed, and Amazon. The research projects include 100% success with NSF CAREER grants, multiple AFOSR Young Investigator Program awards, a DoD MURI award on Assured Information Sharing (my one page write-up went into the BAA), multiple MRIs, a large NSF Trustworthy Computing (now SaTC) grant on secure data provenance,  multiple NSF medium grants (Trustworthy Computing and NeTS programs), and multiple AFOSR grants on topics such as assured cloud computing, reactively adaptive malware and mobile system security, and part of the NSA SoS Lablet in Cyber Physical Systems Security. Our team also pioneered the first of a kind international collaboration funded by AFOSR and EOARD on cloud-based assured information sharing between UTD, Kings College – University of London, and University of Insubria – Italy. We have collaborated with the North Texas Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory for student projects as well as with researchers from AFRL Rome, NY on secure cloud and NIST on semantic web for National Vulnerability Database (NVD). We also work very closely with industry and the team members are part of NSF IUCRCs. More recent prestigious grants include the 2023 USDOT National University Technology Center (led by Clemson University) for which I serve as an Associate Director, UTD lead for the 2024 ARL Collaborative Research on Adversarial Machine Learning, and NIST grant on Trustworthy AI (that will establish a center).

Students: The team has graduated around 200 PhD students to date and has around 80 students in the pipeline. Student placements include tenure track faculty positions at PhD-granting US institutions (as well as foreign universities), industry positions at IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Amazon, Google Privacy, Facebook, Microsoft, Raytheon, eBay, Yahoo, and L3 Communications and research scientist positions at US medical schools. The team is known for its interdisciplinary research, collaborating with faculty across multiple schools at UTD, especially in risk and economics-based data security and privacy, policy-based security and data science for healthcare applications and political event detection. The team has published papers in major cyber security, data science/AI conferences including IEEE Security and Privacy (Oakland), ACM CCS, NDSS, USENIX Security, ACSAC, IEEE ICDM, ACM KDD, ACM SIGMOD, PVLDB, EDBT, ACM OOPSLA, CRYPTO, AAAI, IJCAI, and IEEE ICDE. We were among the first group of 18 universities to be designated an NSA/DHS Center of Excellence in Research in 2008 and were re-certified in 2014 and the first university in TX to get the NSA Cyber Operations Certification in 2015.

Teaching/Education Leadership: Our team has established UTD's undergraduate minor, graduate certificate, and the MS track in Information Assurance/Cyber Security as well as another track in Data Science and I was integrally involved in developing the curriculum for the tracks. Also, my colleague and I developed the curriculum for a 5 day course in data science for NSA https://cs.utdallas.edu/ut-dallas-cs-hosts-nsa-workshop-on-advanced-data-science-summer-2019/ . With approval from the UT System,  we started an interdisciplinary master's degree in cyber security, technology and policy offered from the School of Economics, Policy and Political Sciences in Fall 2020 https://www.utdallas.edu/news/students-teaching/new-degree-cybersecurity-public-policy-2020/. The team members teach courses in several aspects of cyber security and data science including data and applications security, data privacy, secure cloud computing, secure social media, big data analytics, machine learning, reverse engineering for malware, secure programming languages, secure hardware systems, cryptography, secure control systems and critical infrastructure protection, secure cyber physical systems, secure networks, digital forensics, biometrics, and cyber security essentials (CISSP modules).

Education Grants and Certifications: The team has generated over $16M in education funding including a multiple (three) NSF Scholarship for Service (SFS) awards in cyber security and several NSF and NSA Capacity Development grants as well as a highly competitive AI and Security education grant. Our students from the SFS program have gotten jobs with federal agencies (e.g., NSA, CIA) and Federal Labs (e.g., Sandia, Los Alamos, MITRE, MIT Lincoln Lab). We were designated an NSA/DHS Center of Excellence in Education in 2004 and the first university in Texas and the 14th in the US to obtain the NSA CAE certification in Cyber Operations in 2015. I am a strong  believer of integrating researchwith education and subsequently combinedboth our researchand education programs to form the Cyber Security Research and Education Center in September 2010 which then evolved into the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) in April 2013 with a major focus in data science. CSI also includes multiple centers (including NSF-funded Industry University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) in Net Centric Information Systems as well as Centers for Engaging Women in Cyber Security and Women in Data Science). We also collaborate on the INSuRE project (experimental research in cyber security) for 18 semesters in a row with multiple CAE-R universities in the US (and I have been the course director for 15 of the sixteen semesters – 2015 January – 2022 May).

Professional Activities (Tech Transfer, Outreach): Over the past decade, the team has obtained multiple patents including in data science (e.g., social media analytics) and cyber security. Two of the systems are being transferred to commercial products and one of the members has received SBIR grants (Phase 1 and II). The team also gives keynote addresses, conference tutorials, and serves on editorial boards as well as organized NSF workshops (e.g., Big Data Security and Privacy). Articles on the team's work have appeared in venues including the US Airforce, New York Times, New York Daily News, the Dallas Morning News, Fortune Media, The Economist, The LA Times, The Boston Globe, MITRE Matters, WomensDay.com, Creditcards.com, D Magazine, D CEO Magazine, Dallas Business Journal, Raytheon Technology Magazine, and local DFW television (e.g., CW33, CBS, ABC, NBC). We organize conferences in cyber security and hosted the NIST Fourth Cyber Security Framework Workshop (Executive Order 13636, Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity) in September 2013. We have also hosted major/flagship conferences (500-1000+ participants) in data science and cyber security including IEEE ICDM (2013), Women in Cyber Security (2016), ACM CCS (2017) and IEEE ICDE (Virtual, 2020). We also organize workshops on Women in Services Computing and participate in Stanford University's WiDS (Women in Data Science) Conferences.

I.2 My Research and Education Contributions (2004-Present)

Research and Students: While leading and directing the CSI, I continue to carry out my own research in data security as well as in data science/machine learning for applications in social media and malware detection. I have graduated 23 PhD students (including 11women, and those from the African American, Hispanic American and LGBTQ communities and my research has appeared in top tier journals and conferences. I currently have three active PhD students (includes 2 women). Over the years, my research has been published in top tier venues including AAAI, ACM CCS, ACM KDD, IEEE ICDM, VLDB, IEEE ICDE, ACM OOPSLA) as well as in several IEEE and ACM Transactions. I teach courses in data and applications security (since 2005), secure cloud computing (since 2012), social media analytics and security (since 2013), digital forensics (2007-2014), biometrics (2005), cyber security essentials (since 2010), big data security and privacy (since 2020), and Blockchain (Spring 2024). Some of these courses are not in my area (e.g., biometrics, digital forensics) but I took on the challenge of teaching them so that the team members could focus on their research.

Technology Transfer: Together with my colleague, we have developed a highly novel social media analytics system called InXite and worked on commercializing this technology through UTD's Office of Technology Commercialization. My earlier work in secure database systems and secure data models was transferred to early trusted database system products from vendors such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Ingres in the 1990s. I became a NAI Fellow for my patents and technology transfer work and also received several prestigious awards and fellowships including from ACM and IEEE. I have been a PI for research projects totaling over $10M at UT Dallas including a recent center grant from the USDOT on Transportation Systems Security.