Congratulations to Prof. Balaji Palanisamy for being a recipient of the prestigious IBM Research Faculty Award for 2017. Read more

Congratulations to Prof. James Joshi for being selected by the ACM as one of their 2017 Distinguished Member for Scientific Contributions to Computing. Read more

Congratulations to Prof. Palanisamy and team for receiving NSF CyberLearning grant on project titled “Security-Assured Data Science Workforce Development in Pennsylvania). Read more

Congratulations to Chao Li, Balaji Palanisamy, and James Joshi in receiving the Best Paper Award for the paper "Differentially Private Trajectory Analysis for Points-of-Interest Recommendation" at the 6th IEEE International Congress on Big Data held in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA on June 25-30, 2017.

Congratulations to Prof. Prashant Krishnamurthy for their promotion to full professor (June 2017).

For detailed promotion news (Prof. Prashant Krishnamurthy): Read more

Congratulations to Prof. James for being selected as the hird Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. IEEE TSC is the premier journal focus on all aspect of Services computing and Dr. Joshi's tenure as EiC will be for three years.

For more information on IEEE TSC, please visit: TSC Home.

Congratulations to Prof. David Tipper and Prof. James Joshi (Feb, 2016) for their promotion to full professor. Dr. Tipper was promoted in Summer, 2015 and Prof. Joshi was promoted in Spring, 2016.

For detailed promotion news (Prof. David Tipper): Read more

For detailed promotion news (Prof. James Joshi): Read more

SFS students organize a lecture series in Cybersecurity Awareness Symposium with speakers from academia and industry. The featured speakers are from FBI, SEI/CERT, SPAWAR and UPitt’s CSSD.
For the flyer that contains information about venue and times, and speaker info, please CLICK HERE.

Congratulations to Prof. David Tipper, his Tele PhD student Velin Kouven, Post Doctoral Scholar Martin Levesque, and Tele PhD student Teresa Gomes, in receiving the Best Paper award for the following paper at the 11th IEEE Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN 2015) held in Kansas City, MO on March 25-27, 2015.

Click here to read more

SFS master's student Shauna Policicchio presented a poster entitled "Preventing Memory Access Pattern Leakage in Searchable Encryption" at the 2015 iConference, along side Attila A. Yavuz of Oregon State University.

Click here to see their findings

Join members of the Laboratory for Education and Research of Security Assured Information Systems (LERSAIS) to learn about cybersecurity during National Cybersecurity Awareness Month!

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In Early October, Donald McKeon gave a Lecture at Saint Josephs Collegiate Institute in Buffalo, NY. The Lecture was attended by 40 of the high school's Seniors. The lecture content ranged from the dangers of weak passwords to the dangers of over sharing on social media.

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The University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences (iSchool) congratulates iSchool faculty Drs. James Joshi, Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Balaji Palanisamy, Prashant Krishnamurthy, David Tipper and Michael Spring along with School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS) faculty members iSchool alumnus Dr. Bambang Parmanto (PhD'92; MSIS'96) and Dr. Leming Zhou on receiving an award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The $897,055 award is for "A Curriculum for Security Assured Health Informatics," a proposed joint curriculum of the iSchool and SHRS. Dr. Rasu Shrestha from UPMC will serve as industry consultant on the project.

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The School of Information Sciences (iSchool) is proud to report iSchool alum Amirreza Masoumzadeh's (PhD'14) new position at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany. Amirreza began his appointment as tenure track Assistant Professor in the Informatics Department in August 2014. Amirreza chose the iSchool for the close match between his research interests and those of several iSchool faculty members.

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The School of Information Sciences (iSchool) is excited to report that recent Telecommunications and Networking alum' Dr. Saman Taghavi Zargar (PhD'14), has secured a position as Software Engineer (III) at Cisco Systems. Saman will be working as part of the Security Business Group (SBG) where he will be involved in proposing secure architectures for various Cisco products and for the next generation of Internet infrastructure, a topic that has always been of interest to him. When asked what he is most looking forward to, Sam replied, 'Getting to see and feel the impact of my efforts toward securing the network infrastructure in the short term.'

Sam came to the iSchool with both a B.Sc. (2004) and M.Sc. (2007) in Computer Engineering (Software Engineering) from the Azad University of Mashhad and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, respectively. He chose the iSchool for his doctoral studies "because of its unique Telecommunications and Networking program and the faculty's research interests on network security." Additionally...

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Nathalie Baracaldo, a LERSAIS doctoral student, is the 2014 recipient of the Allen Kent Award. This award, named for a Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Graduate Information Science and Technology (GIST) program, is presented annually to a graduate student who makes an outstanding contribution to the GIST program. Nathalie's research has included topics such as secure interoperability in distributed systems, privacy for pervasive systems, mitigation of insider threats, secure storage systems, and privacy on online social networks. She joined LERSAIS in 2009.

SFS students Don McKeon, ShaKari Frazier, and Joel Land presented "Think Like a Hacker: Best Practices for Online Security" to a small audience at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's Job and Career Education Center on April 10th. While demonstrating actual techniques hackers might use to steal information, the students covered online security topics like creating strong passwords, maintaining privacy on Facebook, and identifying phishing attempts. Attendees, who were astonished by some of the demonstrations, were taught best practices for staying safe online. The SFS group plans to present more such workshops in the future.

A recent survey of 2000 IT security professionals, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, has ranked the University of Pittsburgh as the seventh best school in the country for cybersecurity courses and degree programs. University of Texas San Antonio, having fourteen undergraduate and graduate programs in areas such as digital forensics, secure design and intrusion detection and response, grabbed the top spot on the list. Pitt shares the seventh place ranking with George Mason University.

Survey participants were given a list of 403 educational institutions and were asked to select and rank up to five of the institutions in descending order of preference. Respondents were then asked to rate each school's program based on their perceptions about the school's academic rigor, faculty quality and other measures. Schools were assigned weighted scores based on how often survey respondents selected each school, the order in which they were ranked by each respondent and overall perceptions about program quality.

It is unclear how knowledgeable survey respondents were about each school's cybersecurity programs, but the survey seems to paint a fairly clear picture of what IT security practitioners view as the best schools for cybersecurity in the country. Like Pitt, most of the schools in the top ten are NSA- and DHS-certified centers of academic excellence.

Read more about the survey at Computerworld.

Former SFS student and current adjunct faculty, Jonathan Spring (Technical Staff at SEI/CMU), has coauthored a textbook titled Introduction to Information Security. By providing a strategy-based introduction, the book aims to give the readers a clear understanding of how to provide overlapping defenses for critical information. This understanding provides a basis for engineering and risk-management decisions in the defense of information.

Spring received his M.S. from the School of Information Science in 2010. He currently works for SEI/CERT, where he has authored several technical reports and white papers.

"A Survey of Defense Mechanisms Against Distributed Denials of Service Flooding Attacks," a paper co-authored by Saman Taghavi Zargar, James Joshi and David Tipper, was published in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, Fourth Quarter, 2013. The paper has been in the Top Ten of the most popular articles published in ComSoc periodicals sincie its pre-print in September, 2013.

See the top ten lists here: July 2013, August 2013, September 2013, November 2013, December 2013