History

Established and directed by Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Founders Chair Professor of Computer Science and a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS and NAI, The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) has evolved over the past 17 years. Dr. Thuraisingham joined UTD in 2004 after a 24 year career including at Honeywell Inc. the MITRE Corporation and the National Science Foundation.

UTD was designated as an NSA/DHS National Center of Academic Excellence in Education in June 2004, and subsequently the Cyber Security Research Center was established in October 2004. Its research funding reached over $1M in Fall 2007. It became one of the first universities to be designated an NSA/DHS National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research in 2008. CSI received a re-designation as an NSA National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance/Cyber Defense Research and Education for academic years 2014 – 2021. In 2015 it became the first university in Texas and the 14th in the US to receive NSA’s highly prestigious National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations.

Since 2008, its funding has increased rapidly including several prestigious awards such as 100% success with NSF CAREER, multiple AFOSR YIPs, DoD MURI, and several large NSF and DoD grants and contracts. Between 2004 to 2021, CSI grew to around fifteen core professors in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and around 15 more in other schools across the university. The faculty conduct research in several aspects of cyber security and privacy  ranging from hardware, software data and applications security to risk-based security, behavioral and societal aspects of security and cyber security policy.  CSI has received over $65M in research and over $15M in education funding from federal agencies and labs such as NSF, AFOSR, ONR, ARO, IARPA, DARPA, NGA, NASA, NIH, NIST, MITRE and Sandia as well as from corporations such as Raytheon, Nokia, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Intel and Lockheed Martin. The Institute also releases open source software tools for the research and development communities. The Institute conducts extensive interdisciplinary research including on risk and cost-based security. The team is also world-renowned for its interdisciplinary research integrating cyber security with social, behavioral and decision sciences, its research on integrating cyber security with data science/machine learning as well as its research on data privacy especially as it relates to healthcare and genomic applications. In addition, the US Air Force commended the team in a press release in 2010 on its international collaboration on cloud-centric assured information sharing with Kings College, University of London and the University of Insubria Italy.

Members of CSI routinely publish in top tier venues such as IEEE Security and Privacy Conference, ACM CCS, NDSS, Usenix Security, ACSAC, ACM KDD, IEEE ICDM, ACM SIGMOD, PVLDB, IEEE ICDE, CRYPTO and Eurocrypt. Members have obtained several US patents for their research and have founded start-up companies to commercialize their technologies. Members have also received several fellowships and awards including ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow, IACR Fellow and NAI Fellow as well as IBM Faculty awards and other prestigious awards from ACM and IEEE.  CSI members frequently appear on DFW television discussing cyber security attacks as well as write for national newspapers including the New York Times and have participated in panels including those organized by Fortune Media. Their work has also appeared in prominent magazines including The Economist, New Scientist, and the Boston Globe.  CSI has also hosted multiple NSF IUCRCs over the years ranging from Cloud Centric Information Systems to Hardware Security.

With the initial NSF $1.8M Scholarship for Service (SFS) award in September 2010, the Cyber Security Education Center was established in September 2010 and the team has continued to generate multiple NSF SFS awards as well as capacity development funds from NSF and the DoD.  Furthermore, we established the annual TexSAW (Texas Security Awareness Week) conference in 2011 to educate and motivate not only our students in cyber security but also the students in Texas as well as in neighboring states. We have also participated in the multi-university INSuRE experimental research program since January 2015 that gives opportunities for our students to work on real world research problems. We also established multiple education programs including a Masters track in Information Assurance in the Computer Science Department in 2010 and an interdisciplinary Master’s degree in Cyber Security Technology and Policy in 2019 jointly between the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences and the School of Engineering and Computer Science. With the GenCyber award from NSA/NSF to train high school students in cyber security during summer 2016, CSI established the Cyber Security Training and Outreach Center in September 2016. We have continued to teach summer courses to high school interns in recent years as well as offer professional development seminars to DFW industry as well as federal agencies such as the National Security Agency.

In addition to conducting breakthrough research and training students at all levels in cyber security theory and practice, CSI also carries out extensive outreach to educate women and minority communities by giving presentations at various events. Members of CSI co-chaired the Women in Cyber Security conference in March 2016 and subsequently established the Center for Engaging Women in Cyber Security. Since 2016 we have served as co-chair for WiCyS at Tucson and Chicago. We are also very active in Women in Data Science events and gave the featured address at Stanford University’s Women in Data Science (WiDS) event and have hosted the annual WiDS Dallas event. Members are also active in events hosted by Women in Communications Engineering and Women in Services Computing. The team also actively recruitss students from underrepresented minority communities including those from the African American, Hispanic American and the LGBTQ communities.

After directing the Institute for 17 years between October 2004 and September 2021, the leadership was transitioned to Dr. Kevin Hamlen who joined the university in 2006 as an Assistant Professor after his PhD at Cornell University. The Institute will continue to conduct outstanding research, provide excellent education and carry out extensive outreach in cyber security to achieve its mission of being a national resource in cyber security.