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:

Constantine Dovrolis

Constantine Dovrolis

Constantine Dovrolis

Professor
For more than a decade, Constantine Dovrolis has been exploring the evolution of our interconnected world. Dovrolis serves as a Professor in the School of Computer Science, College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is an affiliate of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy. He received his Bachelor's of Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete in 1995; Master’s degree from the University of Rochester in 1996, and his Doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000.  Prior to joining Georgia Tech in August 2002, Dovrolis held visiting positions at Thomson Research in Paris, Simula Research in Oslo, and FORTH in Crete. His current research focuses on the evolution of the Internet, Internet economics, and on applications of network measurement.  He also is interested in cross-disciplinary applications of network science as it relates to biology, clIMaTe science and neuroscience. Dovrolis has served as an editor for the IEEE/ACM’s Transactions on Networking, the ACM Communications Review, and he served as the program co-chair for PAM'05, IMC'07, CoNEXT'11, and as the general chair for HotNets'07.  He was honored with the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2003.                                                   

constantine@gatech.edu

404-385-4205

Office Location:
Klaus 3346

Website

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    Research Focus Areas:
    • Neuroscience
    • Systems Biology
    Additional Research:
    Data Mining & Analytics; IT Economics; Internet Infrastructure & Operating Systems Network science is an emerging discipline focusing on the analysis and design of complex systems that can be modeled as networks. During the last decade or so network science has attracted physicists, mathematicians, biologists, neuroscientists, engineers, and of course computer scientists. I believe that this area has the potential to create major scientific breakthroughs, especially because it is highly interdisciplinary. We have applied network science methods to investigate the "hourglass effect" in developmental biology. The developmental hourglass' describes a pattern of increasing morphological divergence towards earlier and later embryonic development, separated by a period of significant conservation across distant species (the "phylotypic stage''). Recent studies have found evidence in support of the hourglass effect at the genomic level. For instance, the phylotypic stage expresses the oldest and most conserved transcriptomes. However, the regulatory mechanism that causes the hourglass pattern remains an open question. We have used an evolutionary model of regulatory gene interactions during development to identify the conditions under which the hourglass effect can emerge in a general setting. The model focuses on the hierarchical gene regulatory network that controls the developmental process, and on the evolution of a population under random perturbations in the structure of that network. The model predicts, under fairly general assumptions, the emergence of an hourglass pattern in the structure of a temporal representation of the underlying gene regulatory network. The evolutionary age of the corresponding genes also follows an hourglass pattern, with the oldest genes concentrated at the hourglass waist. The key behind the hourglass effect is that developmental regulators should have an increasingly specific function as development progresses. Analysis of developmental gene expression profiles from Drosophila melanogaster and Arabidopsis thaliana provide consistent results with our theoretical predictions. We are currently working on the inference and analysis of functional and brain networks. More information about this project will be posted soon.

    IRI Connections:

    Greg Eisenhauer

    Greg Eisenhauer

    Greg Eisenhauer

    Senior Research Scientist
    Greg Eisenhauer is a research scientist in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Technical Director of the Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems. His research focuses on data-intensive distributed applications in enterprise and high-performance systems. Technical topics of interest include: high-performance I/O for petascale machines; efficient methods for managing large-scale systems, techniques for runtime performance and behavior monitoring, understanding and control; middleware for high-performance data movement and in transit data processing, QoS-sensitive data streaming in pervasive and wide-area systems, and experimentation with representative applications in the high-performance computing and enterprise domains. He received the Bachelor's of Computer Science (1983) and a Master's of Computer Science (1985) from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998. His thesis work demonstrated object-based methods for efficient program monitoring and steering of distributed and parallel programs using event-based monitoring techniques and code annotations.

    eisen@cc.gatech.edu

    404.894.3227

    Website

    Additional Research:
    Large-Scale or Distributed Systems; Software & Applications

    IRI Connections:

    Wenke Lee

    Wenke Lee

    Wenke Lee

    Executive Director, Institute for Information Security and Privacy
    Co-Executive Director, SEI
    Professor

    Wenke Lee, Ph.D., is executive director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) and responsible for continuing Georgia Tech's international leadership in cybersecurity research and education. Additionally, he is the John P. Imlay, Jr. Professor of Computer Science in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where he has taught since 2001. Previously, he served as director of the IISP's predecessor -- the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) research lab -- from 2012 to 2015. Lee is one of the most prolific and influential security researchers in the world. He has published several dozen, oft-cited research papers at top academic conferences, including the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, USENIX Security, IEEE Security & Privacy ("Oakland"), and the Network & Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium. His research expertise includes systems and network security, botnet detection and attribution, malware analysis, virtual machine monitoring, mobile systems security, and detection and mitigation of information manipulation on the Internet. Lee regularly leads large research projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and private industry. Significant discoveries from his research group have been transferred to industry, and in 2006, doing so enabled Lee to co-found Damballa, Inc., which focused on detection and mitigation of advanced persistent threats. Lee’s awards and honors include the “Internet Defense Prize” awarded by Facebook and USENIX in 2015, an “Outstanding Community Service Award” from the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy in 2013, a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship in 2005, an NSF Career Award in 2002, as well as best paper awards in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Passionate about quality education, Lee serves on the advisory boards of the Faculty of Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the board of trustees at Pace Academy in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1999.

    wenke@cc.gatech.edu

    404.385.2879

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Delivery & Storage
    • Machine Learning
    • Network and Security
    • Policy & Economics
    • Vulnerability Analysis
    Additional Research:

    Data Security & Privacy; Encryption; Internet Infrastructure & Operating Systems; Machine Learning; Cyber Technology


    IRI Connections:

    Alberto Dainotti

    Associate Professor Alberto Dainotti

    Alberto Dainotti

    Associate Professor

    Alberto Dainotti is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech where is the Director of the Internet Intelligence Lab. His research is at the intersection of Internet measurement, data science and cybersecurity. He is interested in understanding when and how Internet infrastructure can fail and proposing remedies. To this end, he develops methods and builds near-real-time streaming data analytics systems (IODA, BGPStream, GRIP) that combine diverse data to monitor and improve Internet infrastructure security and reliability. He is also interested in understanding political motivations and implications of Internet cybersecurity events and phenomena. Before joining Georgia Tech, he was an Associate Research Scientist and Principal Investigator at CAIDA, the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego. He received my Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and Systems at University of Napoli "Federico II", Italy, in 2008.

    dainotti@gatech.edu

    Office Location:
    Klaus Advanced Computing Building, #3336

    Internet Intelligence Lab @ Georgia Tech

    Google Scholar

    Additional Research:
    • Data Analytics
    • Internet Data Science
    • Internet & Democracy
    • Networking, Systems, Security
    • Network Measurements

     


    IRI Connections:

    Vijay Ganesh

    Vijay Ganesh, Professor of Computer Science

    Vijay Ganesh

    Associate Director; IDEaS
    Professor

    Dr. Vijay Ganesh is a professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2023, Vijay was a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada from 2012 to 2023 and a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2012. Vijay completed his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2007. Vijay's primary area of research is the theory and practice of SAT/SMT solvers, and their application in AI, software engineering, security, mathematics, and physics. In this context he has led the development of many SAT/SMT solvers, most notably, STP, Z3str4, AlphaZ3, MapleSAT, and MathCheck. He has also proved several decidability and complexity results in the context of first-order theories. More recently he has started working on topics at the intersection of learning and reasoning, especially the use of machine learning for efficient solvers, and the use of solvers aimed at making AI more trustworthy, secure, and robust. For his research, Vijay has won over 30 awards, honors, and medals to-date, including an ACM Impact Paper Award at ISSTA 2019, ACM Test of Time Award at CCS 2016, and a Ten-Year Most Influential Paper citation at DATE 2008.

    vganesh@gatech.edu

    Office Location:
    Klaus Advanced Computing Building, Room 2320

    CoC Profile Page

  • Personal Website
  • Google Scholar

    Additional Research:
    • AI for Scientific and Mathematical Discovery
    • Automated Reasoning - SAT/SMT Solvers and Provers
    • NeuroSymbolic AI via Reasoning and Learning
    • Secure and Trustworthy AI and Machine Learning

    IRI Connections:

    Qirun Zhang

    Qirun Zhang

    Qirun Zhang

    Assistant Professor
    Qirun Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science, College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His main area of research is programming languages, focusing on program analysis and testing. His compiler testing work has led to 300+ confirmed/fixed bugs in important production/research compilers (such as GCC/LLVM/CompCert, Scala, and Rust) and enjoyed wide public acknowledgments from the community. His work on InterDyck-reachability received a PLDI Distinguished Paper Award. Zhang completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and his B.E. in Computer Science from Zhejiang University.

    qrzhang@gatech.edu

    Office Location:
    KACB 2324

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Software & Systems Security
    Additional Research:
    Programming Languages & Correctness;

    Roberto Perdisci

    Roberto Perdisci

    Roberto Perdisci

    Adjunct Assistant Professor
    Roberto Perdisci is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science at the University of Georgia; an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a faculty member of the UGA Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Before joining UGA, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the College of Computing of the Georgia Institute of Technology, working under the supervision of Wenke Lee. He also worked as Principal Scientist at Damballa, Inc., and prior to joining Damballa, he was Research Scholar at the Georgia Tech Information Security Center and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cagliari, Italy with the Pattern Recognition and Applications Group. His research focuses on securing networked systems. He is particularly interested in web security, automating the analysis of security incidents, and defending networks from malware. He often combines systems research with machine learning and large-scale data mining techniques to solve challenging computer and network security problems. Perdisci also is interested in broader aspects of networked systems, including Internet-scale measurements, analysis and optimization of systems performance, and the design of networking protocols. In 2012, he received the National Science Foundation CAREER award for a project titled "Automatic Learning of Adaptive Network-Centric Malware Detection Models."

    perdisci@gtisc.gatech.edu

    404.385.7624

    Website

    Additional Research:
    Data Mining & Analytics; Machine Learning; Network Security

    Paul Pearce

    Paul Pearce

    Paul Pearce

    Assistant Professor, Computer Science
    Paul Pearce is an Assistant Professor at the Georgia Tech School of Computer Science and a Visiting Researcher at Facebook. By developing Internet-scale measurement platforms and new empirical methods, his research brings grounding and understanding to the study of large-scale, hidden Internet security problems. His work spans the areas of cybercrime, censorship, and “advanced persistent threats” (APTs). His work has been distinguished at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and he has been recognized as an EECS Distinguished Graduate Student Instructor.  Paul completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley advised by Vern Paxson and was a member of the Center for Evidence-based Security Research (CESR).

    pearce@gatech.edu

    Webpage

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Cybersecurity Public Policy
    • Systems and Software Security
    • Threat Intelligence and Security Analytics
    Additional Research:
    Data Security & Privacy; Defense / National Security; Internet Infrastructure & Operating Systems; Network Security;