Murat Kantarcioglu

Ashbel Smith Professor - Computer Science
 
972-883-6616
ECS3225
Faculty Homepage
Tags: Security Computer Science Data Science Data Privacy

Professional Preparation

Ph.D. - Computer Science
Purdue University - 2005
Graduate Certificate - Applied Statistics
Purdue University - 2005
M.S. - Computer Science
Purdue University - 2002
B.S. - Computer Engineering with Minor in Finance
Middle East Technical University Ankara, Turkey - 2000

Research Areas

Research Interests

Dr. Kantarcioglu's research focuses on creating technologies that can efficiently extract useful information from any data without sacrificing privacy or security.

Other interests:

  • Security and privacy issues raised by data mining
  • Privacy issues in social networks
  • Security issues in databases
  • Privacy issues in health care
  • Applied cryptography
  • Use of data mining for fraud detection and homeland security

Publications

Please see my publication web page for details 2024 - publications

Projects

Adversarial Learning
2006–2006 Adversarial Learning at Rutgers University, March, 2006
Privacy-preserving Distributed Data Mining
2005–2005 Privacy-preserving Distributed Data Mining, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, March, 2005
Privacy-Preserving Distributed K-nn Classifier
2004–2004 Privacy-Preserving Distributed K-nn Classifier, European Conf. on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (PKDD '04) 2004.
Privacy-preserving data integration and sharing
2004–2004 Privacy-preserving data integration and sharing, The ACM SIGMOD Workshop on Research Issues in Data Mining and Knowledge (DMKD'2004) 2004.

Additional Information

Awards
  • NSF CAREER Award, 2009, National Science Foundation
  • Diamond Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, March 2005, Purdue University’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
  • Homer Warner Award (Best Paper), American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium, 2014
  • Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics, 2017
    Test of Time Award 2019, ACM SACMAT 2019
  • Fellow, Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE), January 2022 to present 
  • Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fall 2020 to present 
  • Distinguished Scientist, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Fall 2016 to present

Appointments
  • 2021-Present Ashbel Smith Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas
  • 2020-Present, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley, RISE Lab
  • 2015-2021, Professor of Computer Science with Tenure, University of Texas at Dallas
  • 2013-Present, Visiting Scholar/Affiliate, Harvard University, Data Privacy Lab
  • 2011-2015, Associate Professor of Computer Science with Tenure, University of Texas at Dallas 
  • Summer 2012, Visiting summer faculty, Air Force Research Lab (AFRL)
  • Summer 2011, Visiting summer faculty, Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) 
  • 2005-2011, Assistant Professor of Computer Science (Tenure Track), University of Texas at Dallas   
  • Summer 2004, Research Intern, IBM Almaden Research Labs (Mentor: Rakesh Agrawal)
  • Summer 2003, Research Intern, NEC C&C Research Labs (Mentor: Wen-syan Li)  
  • Summer 2002, Research Intern, NEC C&C Research Labs (Mentor: Wen-syan Li) 
  • 2001-2005, Research Assistant, Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University
  • 2000-2001, Teaching Assistant, Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University

News Articles

Prof Warns of Risks Hiding on Social Network Sites
Prof Warns of Risks Hiding on Social Network Sites The data that can be easily extracted from people’s online social networking activities could be either a blessing or a curse, says a UT Dallas researcher. On the one hand, an analysis of people’s interactions could improve public policy, helping city planners, for example, determine optimal locations for public health clinics. But on the other hand, you could have your identity stolen and your savings account wiped out after sharing seemingly innocuous details about yourself. These are the sorts of things Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu is exploring. In the early stages of his research, he’s asking questions such as whether details of your Facebook user profile and friendship links can be used to accurately predict your political affiliation. (Yes, according to his results.) Another question is whether a prospective employer could use your information to try to predict whether you would make a good employee.
NSF Award Funds Data-Privacy Research Project
UT Dallas computer scientist Murat Kantarcioglu has received a $400,000 award from the National Science Foundation Early Career Development Program, which is a highly selective program for junior faculty who are considered likely to become leaders in their field. The award will fund a five-year effort to develop privacy-preserving technologies that could open the door to the widespread use of e-health and e-government applications. “The CAREER program is one of the most competitive programs at NSF, and Murat’s award is a recognition of the excellence of his research and his potential to become a top national researcher,” said Mark Spong, dean of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and holder of the Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair in Electrical Engineering.
Project Seeks to Safeguard Privacy of Genomics Data
A new $1 million grant is intended to help ensure the privacy of each person whose information is included in increasingly vast banks of genomics data, according to a UT Dallas computer scientist. The greatest potential for genomics-related medical advances lies in analyzing enormous combined stores of genomics data that may have originated from dozens of institutions and research studies, according to Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu, an assistant professor of computer science at UT Dallas. Such work could ultimately enable health care to be personalized to each patient’s genome. “But the availability of such databanks for widespread use is contingent on protecting the anonymity of the individuals who correspond to the shared records,” said Kantarcioglu, co-investigator on the project based at Vanderbilt University. “Though policy and technical approaches for biomedical records privacy exist, they are inappropriate for environments that consolidate records from multiple organizations.”
Data-Mining Work Offers Insight into Detecting Multiple Hackers
Security efforts to combat hackers usually focus on one method of attack, but computer scientists at UT Dallas have developed a strategy more effective at tackling various types of attacks.
Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu
, professor of computer science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Data Security and Privacy Lab, and research scientist Dr. Yan Zhou have created a data-mining model that can identify various adversaries, or hackers. 
Computer Scientist Receives Intelligence and Security Informatics Award
Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu, a professor of computer science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, recently received the Technical Achievement Award in Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
The award, announced at the recent IEEE ISI 2017 conference in Beijing, recognized Kantarcioglu’s outstanding research contributions to data security and privacy. A previous NSF CAREER Award winner, Kantarcioglu directs UT Dallas’ Data Security and Privacy Lab. His research focuses on efficiently extracting information from big data without sacrificing privacy or security.

Activities

Professional Activities
  • 2007 Program Committee,10th Asia-Pacific Web Conference (APWeb'08)
  • 2007 Program Committee, 24th International Conference on Data Engineering, (ICDE 2008)
  • 2007 Program Committee, 9th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DAWAK) 07
  • 2007 Program Committee, First ACM SIGKDD International Workshop on Privacy, Security, and Trust in KDD (PinKDD'07)
  • 2007 Program Committee, Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07)
  • 2006 Proposal Reviewer, Kentucky Science and Engineering Foundation (KSEF)
  • 2006 Program Committee, International Workshop on Privacy Aspects of Data Mining (PADM'06)
  • 2006 Program Committee, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, (ICDM 06)
  • 2006 Program Committee, 8th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DAWAK) 06
  • 2005 Program Committee, European Conf. on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (PKDD) '05
  • 2005 Proposal Reviewer, Estonian Science Foundation