Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham

Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. I Distinguished Professor
Department of Computer Science
Executive Director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Center
Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science
The University of Texas at Dallas

I joined The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) as a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Center (CySREC) in October 2004 and was appointed to the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. I Distinguished Professorship in September 2010.

Prior to joining UTD, I spent six years in the commercial industry (Honeywell, Control Data Corporation), and 16 years at the MITRE Corporation which included a three year stint as Program Director at the National Science Foundation as IPA, and three years as visiting faculty and/or adjunct faculty at the New Mexico Institute of Technology, University of Minnesota andBoston 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.

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 played a major role on the first release of the CDCNET product in 1985.

I began my research in data and applications security in 1985 and continued for the next 25 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 and ACM OOPSLA.

Between 1993 and 2000, 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.

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 colleagues and students at UTD, we 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, the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security, the VLDB Journal, the Journal of Web Semantics, IEEE ICDM, IEEE ICDE, PVLDB and NDSS. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has also done a press release of our work on secure cloud computing. The major breakthroughs our team has made include novel class detection for stream mining, adversarial learning, and assured cloud-based information sharing. Over the past seven years, we have generated over $16 million in research funding and over $3 million in education funding in cyber security that includes a DoD MURI, multiple NSF Careers, and an AFOSR YIP. CSRC also has two UTD spin-off technology corporations.

I teach courses in Data and Applications Security, Digital Forensics, Trustworthy Web Services and Semantic Web, Biometrics, Secure Cloud Computing and Information Systems Security.

My published work between 1985 and 2010 on secure dependable data management was submitted to my alma mater, the University of Bristol England (ranked #23 in the 2010 US News and World Report ranking), and I received the prestigious higher doctorate degree of Doctor of Engineering in July 2011 (see story).

My work has not only resulted in several publications, but I have also obtained multiple patents, written several books and have received awards from IEEE and ACM. I am a Fellow of IEEE, AAAS and the British Computer Society and a Distinguished Scientist of ACM. My bio can be found here and my CV can be found here.