Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham is the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. I Distinguished Professor in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) since September 2010. She has unique experience working in the commercial industry, federal research laboratory, US government and academia, and her 30+ year career includes research and development, technology transfer, product development, program management, and consulting to the federal government. Dr. Thuraisingham joined UTD in October 2004 as a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Cyber Security Research Center which conducts research in data security and privacy, secure systems, secure networks, secure languages, secure social media, data mining and semantic web. She is an elected Fellow of several prestigious organizations including the IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2002), the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2003), the BCS (British Computer Society, 2005), and the SPDS (Society for Design and Process Science - a society that promotes transdisciplinary research - 2011).
She is the recipient of numerous awards including (i) the IEEE Computer Society''s 1997 Technical Achievement Award for "outstanding and innovative contributions to secure data management", (ii) the 2010 Research Leadership Award for "Outstanding and Sustained Leadership Contributions to the Field of Intelligence and Security Informatics" presented jointly by the IEEE Intelligent and Transportation Systems Society and the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (iii) the 2010 ACM SIGSAC (Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control) Outstanding Contributions Award for "seminal research contributions and leadership in data and applications security for over 25 years" and (iv) the 2011 AFCEA (Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association) Medal of Merit for Sustained Professional Excellence in Communications, Electronics, Intelligence and Information Systems and Service to the Association. She is a Distinguished Scientist of ACM, was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer between 2002 and 2005, and was also featured by Silicon India magazine as one of the seven leading technology innovators of South Asian origin in the USA in 2002. She received the prestigious earned higher doctorate degree of Doctor of Engineering from the University of Bristol, England for her thesis consisting of her published works on secure dependable data management. Over her 30+ year career, Dr. Thuraisingham''s pioneering research contributions include (i) proving that the inference problem is unsolvable and finding solutions to solvable classes of the problem, which has been quoted by the National Security Agency as the significant development in database security in 1990, (ii) novel approaches to designing and developing multilevel secure relational distributed and object systems, (iii) incorporating security into real-time systems and analyzing the tradeoffs, (iv) developing solutions to semantic web-based policy management and incentives for information sharing among organizations and (iv) the development of data mining tools for malware and insider threat detection. During her seven years at UTD, Dr. Thuraisingham has established and leads a strong research program in Intelligence and Security Informatics which now includes 6 core professors and the team has generated over $16 million in research funding from agencies such as NSF, AFOSR, IARPA, NGA, NASA, ONR, ARMY, NIH and DARPA as well as multiple corporations. The research projects include two NSF Career Grants, an AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award, DoD MURI Award on Assured Information Sharing, a large NSF Trustworthy Computing grant on data provenance, and multiple NSF medium grants (Cyber Trust, Trustworthy Computing and NeTS programs) on policy management, inline reference monitors and data integrity and multiple AFOSR grants on topics such as assured cloud computing and reactively adaptive malware.
Her current focus includes three activities: (i) studying how terrorists and hackers function so that effective and improved solutions can be provided, (ii) initiating interdisciplinary programs integrating social sciences and information sciences and (iii) transferring the technologies developed at the university to commercial development efforts. She is also instrumental in establishing UTD''s undergraduate certificate program as well as the MS Track in Information Assurance and is a Co-PI of the $1.8 million NSF Scholarship for Service Award in Cyber Security and PI on a capacity building grant from NSF on assured cloud computing. She teaches courses in data and applications security, trustworthy semantic services, digital forensics, biometrics, information security analytics, and secure cloud computing. Her team collaborates with the North Texas Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory for student projects, researchers from AFRL Rome, NY on assured cloud computing, and industrial research laboratories. Prior to joining UTD, Dr. Thuraisingham was an IPA (Intergovernmental Personnel Act) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, VA, from the MITRE Corporation for three years. At NSF, she established the Data and Applications Security Program and co-founded the Cyber Trust theme and was involved in interagency activities in data mining for counter-terrorism.
She worked at MITRE in Bedford, MA between January 1989 and September 2001, first in the Information Security Center and later as a department head in Data and Information Management as well as Chief Scientist in Data Management in the Intelligence and Air Force centers. At MITRE, she led team research and development efforts on secure data management and real-time data management for NSA, AFRL, SPAWAR, CECOM and CIA. She also served as a technical consultant in information security and data management to the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community for over 10 years and established research programs in data security and data mining. She has continued to serve as an expert consultant to the Department of Treasury since 1999 on software research credit and also advised the Department of Justice in 2001. Thuraisingham''s iancement of Science, 2003), the BCS (British Computer Society, 2005), and the SPDS (Society for Design and Process Science - a society that promotes transdisciplinary research - 2011). She is the recipient of numerous awards including (i) the IEEE Computer Society''s 1997 Technical Achievement Award for "outstanding and innovative contributions to secure data management", (ii) the 2010 Research Leadership Award for "Outstanding and Sustained Leadership Contributions to the Field of Intelligence and Security Informatics" presented jointly by the IEEE Intelligent and Transportation Systems Society and the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (iii) the 2010 ACM SIGSAC (Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control) Outstanding Contributions Award for "seminal research contributions and leadership in data and applications security for over 25 years" and (iv) the 2011 AFCEA (Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association) Medal of Merit for Sustained Professional Excellence in Communications, Electronics, Intelligence and Information Systems and Service to the Association. She is a Distinguished Scientist of ACM, was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer between 2002 and 2005, and was also featured by Silicon India magazine as one of the seven leading technology innovators of South Asian origin in the USA in 2002. She received the prestigious earned higher doctorate degree of Doctor of Engineering from the University of Bristol, England for her thesis consisting of her published works on secure dependable data management.
Over her 30+ year career, Dr. Thuraisingham''s pioneering research contributions include (i) proving that the inference problem is unsolvable and finding solutions to solvable classes of the problem, which has been quoted by the National Security Agency as the significant development in database security in 1990, (ii) novel approaches to designing and developing multilevel secure relational distributed and object systems, (iii) incorporating security into real-time systems and analyzing the tradeoffs, (iv) developing solutions to semantic web-based policy management and incentives for information sharing among organizations and (iv) the development of data mining tools for malware and insider threat detection. During her seven years at UTD, Dr. Thuraisingham has established and leads a strong research program in Intelligence and Security Informatics which now includes 6 core professors and the team has generated over $16 million in research funding from agencies such as NSF, AFOSR, IARPA, NGA, NASA, ONR, ARMY, NIH and DARPA as well as multiple corporations. The research projects include two NSF Career Grants, an AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award, DoD MURI Award on Assured Information Sharing, a large NSF Trustworthy Computing grant on data provenance, and multiple NSF medium grants (Cyber Trust, Trustworthy Computing and NeTS programs) on policy management, inline reference monitors and data integrity and multiple AFOSR grants on topics such as assured cloud computing and reactively adaptive malware. Her current focus includes three activities: (i) studying how terrorists and hackers function so that effective and improved solutions can be provided, (ii) initiating interdisciplinary programs integrating social sciences and information sciences and (iii) transferring the technologies developed at the university to commercial development efforts. She is also instrumental in establishing UTD''s undergraduate certificate program as well.