Seminar: Securing Big Data in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Recent cyberattacks have shown that the leakage/stealing of big data may result in enormous monetary loss and damage to organizational reputation, and increased identity theft risks for individuals. Furthermore, in the age of big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), protecting the security and privacy of stored data is paramount for maintaining public trust, accountability and getting the full value from the collected data. Therefore, we need to address security and privacy challenges ranging from allowing access to big data to building novel AI models using the privacy sensitive data. In this talk, I provide an overview of our end-to-end solution framework that addresses some of these security and privacy challenges that arise in the age of AI. In addition, we will discuss our federated learning framework that is designed to be robust against poisoning attacks and when humans can work with AI to improve decision outcomes. Also, we will discuss how some of the attacks against AI models could be used to protect individual privacy. 

_Biography

Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu is a Professor and CCI Faculty Fellow at the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2005, where he was awarded the Purdue CERIAS Diamond Award for Academic Excellence. He also holds affiliations as a Faculty Associate at Harvard's Data Privacy Lab and as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley's RISE Labs. Dr. Kantarcioglu's research centers on integrating cybersecurity, data science, and blockchain technologies to develop secure and efficient data processing and sharing mechanisms.

His research has been supported by numerous grants from agencies such as NSF, AFOSR, ARO, ONR, NSA, and NIH. Dr. Kantarcioglu has authored over 180 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier venues including NDSS, CCS, USENIX Security, KDD, SIGMOD, ICDM, ICDE, PVLDB, and several IEEE/ACM Transactions. He has also served as Program Co-Chair for prestigious conferences such as IEEE ICDE, ACM SACMAT, IEEE Cloud, IEEE CNS, and ACM CODASPY. His research has been featured by media outlets such as the Boston Globe, ABC News, PBS/KERA, and DFW Television, and he has received multiple best paper awards.

Dr. Kantarcioglu is the recipient of several notable awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the AMIA 2014 Homer R. Warner Award, and the IEEE ISI 2017 Technical Achievement Award, jointly presented by the IEEE SMC and IEEE ITS societies, for his contributions to data security and privacy. He is also a Fellow of both the AAAS and IEEE.