Mustaque Ahamad

Mustaque Ahamad

Mustaque Ahamad

Associate Director, Education and Outreach IISP; Professor

Mustaque Ahamad, Ph.D., is the Associate Director of Education & Outreach for the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) and professor in the College of Computing at Georiga Tech. Within the IISP, he seeks to proactively address challenges associated with workforce development in cybersecurity. With oversight of formal degree programs and continuing education for working professionals, he is an advocate for greater cybersecurity education and training in order to meet the collective needs of industry and government. Ahamad's research interests are in the areas of converged communications security and security of healthcare systems. As smart-phone-like devices enable ubiquitous access to web and voice channels, the convergence of telephony with the Internet gives rise to new cross-channel threats that can combine online and voice attacks. For example, voice phishing with caller-ID spoofing has been reported for stealing online banking credentials. His data-driven research approach for exploring cross-channel threats has resulted in a better understanding of these threats and more effective ways to combat them. In the healthcare security area, he has worked on monitoring for detection of abuse and fraud. Ahamad co-founded Pindrop Security, which commercialized his group's research in the telephony security area, and he continues to serve as its chief scientist. He also serves as co-chair of the Messaging Malware Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) special interest group on voice and telephony abuse. He also served as an external advisor for the Federal Trade Commission for telephony abuse. For nearly 20 years, he has been a leading figure in information security as an associate of the IISP's predecessor -- the Georgia Tech Information Security Center -- since 1998 and including serving as its director from 2004 to 2012. He earned his Master's and Doctoral degrees in Computer Science from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and a B.E. (Hons.) degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. Mustaque Ahamad, Ph.D., is the Associate Director of Education & Outreach for the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) and professor in the College of Computing at Georiga Tech. Within the IISP, he seeks to proactively address challenges associated with workforce development in cybersecurity. With oversight of formal degree programs and continuing education for working professionals, he is an advocate for greater cybersecurity education and training in order to meet the collective needs of industry and government. Ahamad's research interests are in the areas of converged communications security and security of healthcare systems. As smart-phone-like devices enable ubiquitous access to web and voice channels, the convergence of telephony with the Internet gives rise to new cross-channel threats that can combine online and voice attacks. For example, voice phishing with caller-ID spoofing has been reported for stealing online banking credentials. His data-driven research approach for exploring cross-channel threats has resulted in a better understanding of these threats and more effective ways to combat them. In the healthcare security area, he has worked on monitoring for detection of abuse and fraud. Ahamad co-founded Pindrop Security, which commercialized his group's research in the telephony security area, and he continues to serve as its chief scientist. He also serves as co-chair of the Messaging Malware Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) special interest group on voice and telephony abuse. He also served as an external advisor for the Federal Trade Commission for telephony abuse. For nearly 20 years, he has been a leading figure in information security as an associate of the IISP's predecessor -- the Georgia Tech Information Security Center -- since 1998 and including serving as its director from 2004 to 2012. He earned his Master's and Doctoral degrees in Computer Science from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and a B.E. (Hons.) degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India.

mustaq@cc.gatech.edu

404.894.2593

Website

Research Focus Areas:
  • Network and Security Vulnerability Analysis
Additional Research:
Healthcare Security; Mobile & Wireless Communications

IRI Connections:

Marilyn Brown

Marilyn Brown

Marilyn Brown

Regents' Professor
Brook Byers Professor

Marilyn Brown is a Regents' and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy. She joined Georgia Tech in 2006 after a distinguished career at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she led several national climate change mitigation studies and became a leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States. 

Her research focuses on the design and impact of policies aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of sustainable energy technologies, with an emphasis on the electric utility industry, the integration of energy efficiency, demand response, and solar resources, and ways of improving resiliency to disruptions. Her books include Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Green Savings: How Policies and Markets Drive Energy Efficiency (Praeger, 2015), and Climate Change and Global Energy Security (MIT Press, 2011). She has authored more than 250 publications. Her work has had significant visibility in the policy arena as evidenced by her numerous briefings and testimonies before state legislative bodies and Committees of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

Dr. Brown co-founded the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance and chaired its Board of Directors for several years. She has served on the Boards of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Alliance to Save Energy, and was a commissioner with the Bipartisan Policy Center. She has served on eight National Academies committees and is an Editor of Energy Policy and an Editorial Board member of Energy Efficiency and Energy Research and Social Science. She served two terms (2010-2017) as a Presidential appointee and regulator on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public power provider. From 2014-2018 she served on DOE’s Electricity Advisory Committee, where she led the Smart Grid Subcommittee.

marilyn.brown@pubpolicy.gatech.edu

(404) 385-0303

Website

Google Scholar

Research Focus Areas:
  • Biobased Materials
  • Biochemicals
  • Biorefining
  • Biotechnology
  • Energy & Water
  • Energy Generation, Storage, and Distribution
  • Energy Utilization and Conservation
  • Hydrogen Equity
  • Materials for Energy
  • Policy & Economics
  • Pulp Paper Packaging & Tissue
  • Social & Environmental Impacts
  • Sustainable Manufacturing
  • Use & Conservation
Additional Research:
Hydrogen Equity; ClIMaTe/Environment; Electrical Grid; Policy/Economics; Energy & Water

IRI Connections:

Raheem Beyah

Raheem Beyah

Raheem Beyah

Dean, College of Engineering
Motorola Foundation Professor

Raheem Beyah, Ph.D., is associate chair for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation, and the Motorola Foundation Professor in the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research is at the intersection of the networking and security fields. He leads the Georgia Tech Communications Assurance and Performance Group (CAP), which develops algorithms that enable a more secure network infrastructure with computer systems that are more accountable and less vulnerable to attacks. Through experimentation, simulation, and theoretical analysis, CAP provides solutions to current network security problems and to long-range challenges as current networks and threats evolve. Dr. Beyah has served as guest editor and associate editor of several journals in the areas of network security, wireless networks, and network traffic characterization and performance. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2009 and was selected for DARPA's Computer Science Study Panel in 2010. He is a member of NSBE, ASEE, and is a senior member of IEEE and ACM. Beyah is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina A&T State University in 1998. He received his Master's and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1999 and 2003, respectively. Prior to returning to Georgia Tech, Dr. Beyah was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Georgia State University, a research faculty member with the Georgia Tech Communications Systems Center (CSC), and a consultant in Andersen Consulting's (now Accenture) Network Solutions Group.

rbeyah@ece.gatech.edu

404.894.2531

Office Location:
KACB 2308

Website

Research Focus Areas:
  • Cyber Technology
  • Network and Security Vulnerability Analysis
  • Cyber-Physical Systems
Additional Research:
Mobile & Wireless Communications; Network Science

IRI Connections:

Stephen Balakirsky

Stephen Balakirsky

Stephen Balakirsky

Regents' Researcher; Georgia Tech Research Institute
Director of Technical Initiatives; IBB
Chief Scientist | Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory (ATAS); GTRI

Stephen Balakirsky is the Chief Scientist for the Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and the Director of Technical Initiatives at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) at Georgia Tech.

Balakirsky’s research interests include robotic architectures, planning, bio-automation, robotic standards, and autonomous systems testing. His work in knowledge driven robotics couples real-time sensors and knowledge repositories to allow for flexibility and agility in robotic systems ranging from assembly and manufacturing systems to surveillance and logistics systems. The framework promotes software reuse and the ability to detect and correct for execution errors.

Previously, Balakirsky worked as a project manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and was a senior research engineer at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL). At ARL, Balakirsky performed mobile robotics research in several areas, including command and control, mapping, human-computer interfaces, target tracking, vision processing and tele-operated control.

stephen.balakirsky@gtri.gatech.edu

404.407.8547

Office Location:
Food Processing Technology Building, 640 Strong St, Atlanta, GA 30318

Google Scholar

Research Focus Areas:
  • Collaborative Robotics
Additional Research:

Robotics; Planning; Knowledge Representation; Ontologies


IRI Connections:

Annie Anton

Annie Anton

Annie Anton

Professor

Annie Anton, Ph.D., is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, which she chaired until 2017. Previously, she served as a professor in the Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University, where she was director of the CSC Policy and Compliance Initiative and a member of the NCSU Cyber Defense Lab. In 2010, she chaired the NC State University Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Committee. In 2008, she chaired the NC State Public Policy Task Force. Anton's research focuses on methods and tools to support the specification of complete, correct behavior of software systems used in environments that pose risks of loss as a consequence of failures and misuse. This includes systems in which the security of personal and private information is particularly vulnerable. Current extensions to this work, include the analysis of federal security and privacy regulations, and compliance practices. Anton is the founder and director of ThePrivacyPlace.org, a research group of students and faculty at Georgia Tech, CMU, NC State and UMBC. This group is interested in technologies that assist practitioners and policy makers in meeting the challenge of eliciting and expressing policies and regulations (a form of requirements). These tools help ensure that software systems are aligned with the privacy polices and regulations that govern these systems. Her professional activities include a notable combination of multi-disciplinary research and education. She is co-founder of the annual Requirements Engineering and the Law Workshop (RELAW). She is a former associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, cognitive issues subject area editor for the Requirements Engineering Journal, and the International Board of Referees for Computers & Security. Antón has served on various boards, ᅠincluding: ᅠPresident Obama's Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, the NIST Information Security & Privacy Advisory Board, the IEEE Computer Society Research Board, an Intel Corporation Advisory Board, the Future of Privacy Forum Advisory Board. ᅠShe is a former member of the U.S. DHS Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, the CRA Board of Directors, the NSF Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate Advisory Council, the Distinguished External Advisory Board for the TRUST Research Center at U.C. Berkeley, the DARPA ISAT Study Group, the USACM Public Policy Council, the Advisory Board for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., the Georgia Tech Alumni Association Board of Trustees, the Microsoft Research University Relations Faculty Advisory Board, the CRA-W, the Georgia Tech Advisory Board (GTAB), and Corporate Secretary for Trekking for Kids, Inc.

aa16@gatech.edu

404.894.8591

Website

Research Focus Areas:
  • Cybersecurity Public Policy
Additional Research:
Data Security & Privacy;

IRI Connections:

Sam Brown

Sam Brown

Sam Brown

Professor

Sam Brown's lab studies the multi-scale dynamics of infectious disease. Their goal is to improve the treatment and control of infectious diseases through a multi-scale understanding of microbial interactions. Their approach is highly interdisciplinary, combining theory and experiment, evolution, ecology and molecular microbiology in order to understand and control the multi-scale dynamics of bacteria pathogens.

sam.brown@biology.gatech.edu

Office Location:
ES&T 2244

Website

  • http://biosci.gatech.edu/people/sam-brown
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Drug Design, Development and Delivery
    • Molecular Evolution
    • Systems Biology
    Additional Research:
    Evolutionary microbiology, bacterial social life, virulence and drug resistance

    IRI Connections:

    Mark Borodovsky

    Mark Borodovsky

    Mark Borodovsky

    Regents' Professor
    Director, Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics
    Senior Advisor in Bioinformatics, Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta

    Dr. Borodovsky and his group develop machine learning algorithms for computational analysis of biological sequences: DNA, RNA and proteins. Our primary focus is on prediction of protein-coding genes and regulatory sites in genomic DNA. Probabilistic models play an important role in the algorithm framework, given the probabilistic nature of biological sequence evolution.

    borodovsky@gatech.edu

    404-894-8432

    Office Location:
    EBB 2105

    Website

  • GeneMark
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Algorithms & Optimizations
    • Machine Learning
    • Systems Biology
    Additional Research:

    Development and applicaton of new machine learning and pattern recognition methods in bioinformatics and biological systems. Development and applicaton of new machine learning and pattern recognition methods in bioinformatics and biological systems. Chromatin; Epigenetics; Bioinformatics


    IRI Connections:

    Dhruv Batra

    Dhruv Batra

    Dhruv Batra

    Associate Professor; School of Interactive Computing

    Dhruv Batra is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and AI, with a focus on developing intelligent systems that are able to concisely summarize their beliefs about the world with diverse predictions, integrate information and beliefs across different sub-components or `modules' of AI (vision, language, reasoning, dialog), and interpretable AI systems that provide explanations and justifications for why they believe what they believe. In past, he has also worked on topics such as interactive co-segmentation of large image collections, human body pose estIMaTion, action recognition, depth estIMaTion, and distributed optimization for inference and learning in probabilistic graphical models. He is a recipient of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award (2016), the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award (2014), Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award (2014), Virginia Tech College of Engineering Outstanding New Assistant Professor award (2015), two Google Faculty Research Awards (2013, 2015), Amazon Academic Research award (2016), Carnegie Mellon Dean's Fellowship (2007), and several best paper awards (EMNLP 2017, ICML workshop on Visualization for Deep Learning 2016, ICCV workshop Object Understanding for Interaction 2016) and teaching commendations at Virginia Tech. His research is supported by NSF, ARO, ARL, ONR, DARPA, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. Research from his lab has been extensively covered in the media (with varying levels of accuracy) at CNN, BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg Business, The Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, Newsweek, The Verge, New Scientist, and NPR. From 2013-2016, he was an Assistant Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he led the VT Machine Learning & Perception group and was a member of the Virginia Center for Autonomous Systems (VaCAS) and the VT Discovery Analytics Center (DAC). From 2010-2012, he was a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute located on the University of Chicago campus. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2010 respectively, advised by Tsuhan Chen. In past, he has held visiting positions at the Machine Learning Department at CMU, CSAIL MIT, Microsoft Research, and Facebook AI Research.

    dbatra@gatech.edu

    Website

  • Personal Research Website
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Collaborative Robotics
    • Shaping the Human-Technology Frontier
    Additional Research:

    Machine Learning; Computer Vision; Artificial Intelligence


    IRI Connections:

    Rosa Arriaga

    Rosa Arriaga

    Rosa Arriaga

    Associate Professor

    Arriaga is a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher in the School of Interactive Computing. She uses psychological concepts, theories and methods to address fundamental topics of HCI and Social Computing. Her current research interests are in the area of chronic care management and mental health. She designs mHealth systems that address gaps in chronic care and mental health management. The computational systems she designs: foster engagement, facilitate continuity of care, promote patient self-advocacy, and mediate communication between patient and healthcare providers.

    arriaga@cc.gatech.edu

    404-385-4239

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Lifelong Health and Well-Being
    Additional Research:
    Bioinformatics; Human-Computer Interaction; Developmental Psychology; Chronic Care Management

    IRI Connections:

    Robert Butera

    Robert Butera

    Robert Butera

    Chief Research Operations Officer
    Professor

    rbutera@gatech.edu

    404-894-2935

    Office Location:
    UAW 3111

    Website

  • Related Site
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Neuroscience
    Additional Research:

    Neuromodulation of peripheral nerve activity real-time control methods applied to electrophysiology measurements Autonomic modulation of visceral organs. Our laboratory combines engineering and neuroscience to tackle real-world problems. We utilize techniques including intracellular and extracellular electrophysiology, computational modeling, and real-time computing.


    IRI Connections: