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University Joins National Transportation Center in Cybersecurity

The University of Texas at Dallas recently joined a multi-university transportation center focusing on cybersecurity that is sponsored by the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT). Clemson University, the lead university of this center, invited UT Dallas to join its proposal team due to the exceptional expertise UT Dallas has developed in cybersecurity and privacy over the past 20 years. The center will receive $20 million from the USDOT for 5 years to provide novel solutions to problems faced by the transportation industry.

The USDOT University Transportation Center (UTC) in cybersecurity is called TRaCR (Department of Transportation Cybersecurity and Resiliency Center). UT Dallas will lead the data privacy as well as cybersecurity risk projects for TRaCR and will collaborate with the other universities on projects in adversarial machine learning, machine learning for cybersecurity, secure data management and the applications of blockchain, all for transportation systems.

TRaCR Group Members at USDOT

The UT Dallas team will be led by Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Founders Chair Professor of Computer Science and founding executive director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) at UT Dallas. She will serve as the principal investigator (PI) of the UTC from UT Dallas.

“Our team has been working in transportation systems security for over five years, and we have published papers in top tier venues as well as given numerous keynote addresses on this topic including at a conference organized by Clemson University in 2019,” Thuraisingham said. “This positioned us very well to participate and contribute to the winning proposal. As we make progress on TRaCR, we plan to work with Clemson University and submit proposals so that we can continue to develop solutions to the challenging problems in Transportation Systems Security. We are honored that Clemson University invited us to join their team.”

Thuraisingham will also serve as one of the Associate Directors of TRaCR together with the PIs from the member universities and will work with the Director of the Center from Clemson, Dr. Mashrur “Ronnie” Chowdhury, the Eugene Douglas Mays Chair of Transportation and Professor of Civil Engineering who is a world-renowned expert in transportation systems and has also contributed extensively to cybersecurity. Dr. Chowdhury will serve as the lead PI for the entre UTC. The TRaCR kickoff meeting with USDOT took place in Washington DC on May 3, 2023, and Dr. Kantarcioglu represented UT Dallas at this meeting.

The co-principal investigators from UT Dallas are Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu, Ashbel Smith Professor of Computer Science and an expert in data privacy, Dr. Latifur Khan, a professor of computer science, an eminent data scientist and a pioneer on integrating cybersecurity and machine learning and Dr. Alain Benssousan, Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair and professor in the Naveen Jindal School of Management who is a renowned authority in risk and decision sciences. The UT Dallas team also includes Dr. Kevin Hamlen, the Louis Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and the current Executive Director of CSI whose expertise is in software and programming language security and Dr. Tyler Summers, associate professor of mechanical engineering who brings strong cyber-physical systems expertise.

UT Dallas received the National Security Agency (NSA) Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Center for Cybersecurity Education in 2004, one of the first 18 universities to receive the NSA/DHS Center for Cybersecurity Research in 2008 and became the first university in Texas and the fourteenth in the U.S. to receive the NSA Center for Cyber Operations in 2015. Through CSI, UT Dallas has developed exceptional expertise in cybersecurity with grants and contracts from numerous federal agencies including the NSF, NSA, DHS, Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Army Research Office (ARO), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), NASA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), Department of Energy (DOE), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)).

In addition to research, UT Dallas has also obtained numerous grants from the NSF and NSA for Cybersecurity Education through CSI, and has established multiple education programs including one with the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences on cybersecurity technology and policy. The University plans to add courses in transportation systems security as progress is made on TraCR. As part of its cyber operations program, UT Dallas offers extensive practical experience with cutting-edge cybersecurity tools to its students. Members of CSI have received numerous awards and fellowships from organizations such as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) among others as well as several NSF CAREER, multiple Department of Defense Young Investigator Program (DoD YIP) and IBM faculty awards. These efforts and accolades have resulted in several universities partnering on large-scale winning proposals with UT Dallas such as the DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI).

“We are grateful to UT Dallas administration for supporting us in putting together the proposal,” Thuraisingham said. “In particular, we thank Dr. Ovidiu Daescu, head of the Department of Computer Science; Dr. Stephanie Adams, Jonsson School dean; Dr. John Hansen, associate dean for research at the Jonsson School; Dr. Joe Pancrazio, vice president for research, several members of our Office of Sponsored Research and Ms. Rhonda Walls, project coordinator for CSI.”

“This award is the result of many years of hard work by a group of dedicated faculty at the core of the CSI, and asserts UT Dallas on the national map as a leader in research and development for ensuring the cyber safety of the transportation systems of tomorrow. I see TRaCR as a first yet critical step in positioning UT Dallas among the Universities at the forefront of a transportation systems revolution powered by technologies that span across most engineering fields. I am particularly proud of the achievements of Prof. Thuraisingham, who for years has been the soul and driving force behind CSI,”  said Dr. Ovidiu Daescu, head of the Department of Computer Scienc.

ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 4,000 bachelors-degree students, more than 1,010 master’s students, 140 Ph.D. students,  52 tenure-track faculty members, and 42 full-time senior lecturers, as of Fall 2022. With the University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.