Members of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Team Receive Prestigious Awards Affiliated With Multiple IEEE Technical Committees

First, Assistant Professor Kangkook Jee received the prestigious IEEE BigDataSecurity Junior Research Award from the Technical Committee on Scalable Computing. Kangkook joined UT Dallas after completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University and spending several years as a research scientist at NEC Research. His primary expertise lies in the system and software security area and has grown to cover a broader range of security- and safety-related topics. Recently, Dr. Jee has worked on three main thrusts: (1) Safety and security of Industrial Control/Cyber-Physical systems (ICS/CPS), (2) Securing a large number of systems with provenance analysis, and (3) Improving machine-assisted program analysis.

Second, Professor Latifur Khan received the best paper award at the IEEE BigDataSecurity conference for his paper titled Adaptive Margin Based Deep Adversarial Metric Learning. The UT Dallas co-authors of this paper are Zhuoyi Wang, Yigong Wang, Bo Dong, Sahoo Pracheta, Latifur Khan, and Kevin Hamlen. Dr. Khan’s group designed and developed an adaptive margin deep adversarial metric learning (AMDAML) framework based on distance/metric learning in the context of an ambiguous test set to facilitate classification. It exploits numerous common negative samples to generate potential hard (adversarial) negatives and applies them to facilitate robust metric learning. Dr. Khan also gave a keynote address at this event titled Data to Knowledge: Modernizing Political Event Data. He is the recipient of several other awards, including the ACM Distinguished Scientist Award, the IEEE ISI (Intelligence and Security Informatics) Technical Achievement Award, and the IEEE BigDataSecurity inaugural Senior Research Award.

Finally, Founders Chair Professor Bhavani Thuraisingham received the prestigious IEEE CS Cloud inaugural Technical Excellence Award from the Special Technical Committee on Smart Computing. She received the award for her pioneering research on integrating artificial intelligence, cyber security, and the cloud. She also gave the conference opening keynote address, titled Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security for Cloud-based Internet of Transportation Systems. Dr. Thuraisingham is the recipient of numerous awards including Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS and NAI, IEEE Computer Society’s 1997 Technical Achievement Award, ACM SIGSAC 2010 Outstanding Contributions award, ACM CODASPY 2017 inaugural Lasting Research Award, IEEE Services Computing inaugural 2017 Research Innovation Award, the IEEE Communications Society’s 2019 Technical Recognition Award in Communications and Information Security, and the Dallas Business Journal 2017 Women in Technology Award. She was also recently named the Cyber Defense Magazine’s top 100 women in Cyber Security in 2020.