Three Professors Focused on Cybersecurity Join ECE

Published August 5, 2013

As the fall semester begins, the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in conjunction with UMIACS and MC², welcomes three new assistant professors with focused interests in cybersecurity. Drs. Dana Dachman-Soled, Tudor Dumitras and Charalampos Papamanthou join ECE as assistant professors.

Dr. Dana Dachman-Soled received her B.A. in Math and Computer Science from Yeshiva University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University under the supervision of Professor Tal Malkin. While at Columbia, Dachman-Soled received the FF SEAS Presidential Fellowship. After graduation, she participated in post-doctoral work with Dr. Yael Tauman Kalai at Microsoft Research, focusing on constructing cryptographic schemes secure against leakage and tampering, as well as questions relating to delegation and black box complexity.

Her current research endeavors are concentrated in cryptography and security, although she also has interest in computational learning theory and property testing of Boolean functions.

Professor Dachman-Soled is excited to be teaching Cryptography Against Physical Attacks this semester.

Prior to joining ECE at UMD, Dr. Tudor Dumitras worked at Symantec Research Labs where he built the Worldwide Intelligence Network Environment (WINE), a platform for experimenting with Big Data techniques. As a professor in the department, Dumitras’ research will focus on Big Data approaches to problems in system security and dependability.

Dr. Dumitras completed his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He continued there to complete his Ph.D. under Professor Priya Narasimhan. His dissertation topic was “Improving the Dependability of Distributed Systems through AIR Software Updates.”

Dumitras received an Honorable Mention in the NSA competition for the Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper of 2013. He also received the 2011 A.G. Jordan Award from the ECE department at Carnegie Mellon University, the 2009 John Vlissides Award from ACM SIGPLAN, and the Best Paper Award at ASP-DAC ’03.

Professor Dumitras will be teaching Cybersecurity Data Science this coming semester and is actively recruiting Ph.D. students to join his research group.

Dr. Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou joins ECE from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a post-doctoral researcher working on applied cryptography and computer security, and especially on technologies, systems and theory for secure and private cloud computing. While working at the University of Maryland in ECE, UMIACS, and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC²), Papamanthou’s research will continue to explore problems in computer security and applied cryptography.

He obtained his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Brown University and 2011 and 2007 respectively. While at Brown, he was the recipient of the Kanellakis and van Dam fellowships and he also interned at Intel Research (2008) and Microsoft Research (2010). Before graduate school, he studied in Greece at the University of Crete (MSc.) and at the University of Macedonia (B.S.). He has published in venues and journals spanning theoretical and applied cryptography, systems and database security, graph algorithms and visualization and operations research.

Professor Papamanthou is currently seeking Ph.D. students to join his research group and will be teaching Computer Security (ENEE459-C) this fall.