48th Annual Chancellor’s Council Symposium – Building a Global Firewall
The UT System held its 48th Chancellor’s Council Annual Meeting and Symposium in Austin, Texas, on May 8, 2015. Approximately 1,000 donors to the UT System were in attendance for the event where Chancellor Bill McRaven gave his first “State of the System” address. To showcase the excellent research and innovative initiatives at UT institutions, three panels of distinguished speakers presented on their research programs; “Outsmarting an Outbreak”, “Turning the Tables on Cancer”, and “Building a Global Firewall”.
Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, UT Dallas Professor of Computer Science and the executive director of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI), was on the cyber security panel titled “Building a Global Firewall.” Dr. Thuraisingham was joined by cyber security experts Greg White, PhD, Director of the Center for Infrastructure Assurance & Security, UT San Antonio, Ann Quiroz Gates, PhD, Director of the Cyber-ShARE Center of Excellence, UT El Paso, and Suzanne Barber, PhD, Director of the Center for Identity, UT Austin.
Dr. Thuraisingham, an expert on data science, focused on the importance of protecting the world from cyber threats and described how data mining has become a critical tool in ensuring national security. “Data is everywhere – financial data, healthcare data, and social media to mention a few. Data mining is the process of digging through data and extracting nuggets of information, and possibly make predictions. The flip side of data mining is privacy. How can you maintain 100% accuracy as well as 100% privacy? It’s a tradeoff.”
Dr. Thuraisingham went on to describe the Air Force Office of Scientific Funded Research (AFOSR) work that her team has been doing for the past decade on privacy in the “cloud”. Dr. Thuraisingham and her collaborators in the CS Department, Drs. Kevin Hamlen, Murat Kantarcioglu and Latifur Khan, are currently conducting research in an area called “Active Malware Defense” and are also working on developing a secure cloud computing framework. “The work that I presented is truly the result of years of collaborative efforts,” said Dr. Thuraisingham.
Chancellor Bill McRaven stated in his State of the System address that “When it comes to fighting cancer, protecting the world from cyber threats or outsmarting an outbreak, UT institutions have got the best and the brightest on the job. And that’s why we truly are the Universe of Texas.”
About the UT Dallas Computer Science Department
The Department of Computer Science at UT Dallas is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 1,300 bachelor’s-degree students, more than 1150 master’s students, 150 PhD students, and 75 faculty members. The Department is committed to exceptional teaching and research in a culture that is as daring as it is supportive.