The May 9 meeting of Consultants Network should be a very interesting presentation.

Join a friendly group of engineers for Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. Distinguished Professor, Department of Computer Science, and Executive Director of the Cyber Security Research Institute, at UTD.  She has a fascinating bio and a wealth of expertise in this area.

Here’s what Dr. Thraisingham says:

I have a unique 35 year career first as a visiting faculty, then in the commercial computer industry, followed by federally funded research and development center experience and then as program director in the government before joining academia full time as a tenured professor in 2004. I joined The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) as a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Cyber Security Research Center. Since 2010 I have been the Louis Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and the Executive Director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) at UTD. I am also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Informatics at Kings College University of London, England 2015-2018.

Prior to joining UTD, I spent 24 years in the commercial industry (Honeywell, Control Data Corporation), and at MITRE Corporation and the National Science Foundation as IPA. During this time I also worked as visiting faculty and/or adjunct faculty at the New Mexico Institute of Technology, University of Minnesota and Boston University.

Between 1980 and 1983, while at the New Mexico Institute of Technology and the University of Minnesota, my research was focused on theory of computation where I studied decision problems for systems functions which are essentially inference functions. This work was published in journals such as the Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic and the Journal of Mathematical Logic. I also conducted research in Algorithmic Information Theory during this time.

From 1983 to 1986, while working in computer network development at Control Data Corporation, my research focused on distributed systems and this work was published in journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the IEEE Network.

I began my research in data and applications security in 1985 and continued for the next 30 years while at Honeywell, MITRE, NSF and at UTD. My early work between 1985 and 1995 focused on secure relational, object and distributed and deductive data management systems. I also proved that the inference problem was unsolvable and this work was cited as the most significant work in database security by the National Security Agency in 1990. Numerous papers were published in several prestigious journals and conferences on this research including in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE ICDE, ACSAC, IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, and ACM OOPSLA.

Between 1993 and 2001, I conducted research in real-time systems and subsequently contributed to integrating secure systems and real-time systems. This work was published in journals and conferences such as IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Real-Time Systems Journal and the VLDB Conference. During this time I also worked in data mining and led the Massive Digital Data Systems project for the Intelligence Community.

Between 2001 and 2004, I established the Data and Applications Security special competition at NSF and was a member of the Cyber Trust theme. During this time I worked tirelessly to promote Data and Applications Security as well as Data Mining for Counter-terrorism and gave talks at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the United Nations.

Since October 2004, together with my students and colleagues at UTD, I have made significant contributions in the areas of policy-based information sharing as well as ontology alignment, data mining for malware detection and secure cloud computing. This work has appeared in premier journals and conferences including IEEE Transactions in Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, IEEE Transctions on Reliability, ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, the VLDB Journal, the Journal of Web Semantics, ACM KDD, ACM CODASPY, ACM SACMAT, ACSAC, and IEEE ICDM. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has also done a press release of my work on secure cloud computing.

I teach courses in Data and Applications Security, Digital Forensics, Trustworthy Web Services and Semantic Web, Biometrics, Secure Cloud Computing, Analyzing and Securing Social Media, and Information Systems Security. I have mentored junior faculty as well as women and minority students and have given featured addresses at conferences and events organized by SWE, WITI, CRA-W and the BCS/UCL London Hopper. I co-chaired the Women in Cyber Security Conference (WiCyS) in Dallas in 2016 at which over 800 people including around 700 women participated and will continue promoting Women in Cyber Security by establishing a Center as part of CSI. I have been a consultant to the NSA in data security between 1991-1997, the CIA in data analytics between 1993-1999 and the IRS on software research credit since 1999. I am also involved in transferring the university technologies to commercial products.

I have held team leadership and management positions for the past 27 years at MITRE, NSF and UTD. These include leading multiple team efforts in cyber security and data analytics at MITRE between 1989 and 1995, managing a Department between 1995 and 1999 where I grew the department from 8 to 28 staff, working as chief technologist between 1999 and 2001, managing programs at NSF between 2001 and 2004 and directing the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute since 2004 whose memebrs have generated over $30M in research and over $7M in education funding including 100% success rate with NSF CAREER (4 out of 4) and multiple AFOSR YIPs, and DoD MURI among others.

My work has not only resulted in several publications including over 120+ journals, 250+ conferences, 130+ keynote/featured addresses (e.g., at ACM SACMAT, EDBT, ICMLA, PAKDD, ARES, ASIACCS), and 100+ panel presentations, I have also obtained five patents, authored 14 books, edited several more, served (serving) as program and/or general chair of prestigious conferences (e.g., ACM SACMAT, IEEE ICDE, ACM CCS, IEEE ICDM, IFIP 11.3) and have received prestigious awards from IEEE and ACM. My short bio can be found here.  My CV can be found here.  More details about my work can be found here.

Follow me on Twitter @CyberUTD; Visit me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/bhavani.thuraisingham; View my blogs at http://drbhavani.wordpress.com; Connect me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pub/dr-bhavani-thuraisingham-aka-dr-bhavani/27/51/753./