Keynote Speakers

Dr. Peter Mueller, IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland

Title of Talk: Developments in Security for a Future with Quantum Computers

Biography: Peter Mueller joined IBM Research as a Research Staff Member in 1988. His research expertise covers broad areas of distributed computing systems architecture, microwave technology, device physics, nano science and modeling. His current field of research is in the areas of data center storage security and quantum technology. Peter is a founding member and was the Chair of the IEEE ComSoc Communications and Information Systems Security Technical Committee (CIS-TC). In the course of his carrier he authored and co-authored more than 100 papers, 2 books, granted 10 patents and served as guest editor for many special issue publications. He also served as a government counsel and as organizer for numerous international conferences and workshops. His affiliations include active society membership in IEEE, where he is Senior Member; the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM); the Electrochemical Society (ECS); and the Swiss Physical Society (SPS).

Talk description: Thirty-five years ago, Richard Feynman thought up the idea of a ‘Quantum Computer’, which at that time was recognized as a topic of science fiction. But with advances in science and technologies of computing, communications and informatics, the fiction is becoming reality. About twenty-five years ago, Peter Shor observed his famous algorithm which allows efficient factorization implementable by basic operations on a quantum computer. Further developments showed weaknesses in almost all commonly applied public key schemes, such as RSA, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECDSA), Finite Field Cryptography (DSA) and Diffie-Hellman key exchange. We will take a look into the basic quantum computing hardware and compare its capabilities with traditional processors. Questions like the application of quantum technology to protect information at higher level, problems hard to solve for quantum computers and its implementation on traditional processors will be addressed and compared with the related topics in our current areas of research.

Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, India

Title of Talk: Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM)

Biography: Dr. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK") Associate Professor, is currently the Hemant Bharat Ram Faculty Research Fellow at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, India. PK is the Founding Head of Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre (CERC). PK is one of ACM India Eminent Speakers. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research interests include Privacy, e-Crime, Online Social Media, and Usable Security, in particular, these days he has been dabbling with complex networked systems (e.g. social web systems like Twitter, Facebook, and telephone logs). He is also very passionate about issues related to human computer interaction. As Principal Investigator, PK is currently managing research projects of about 2 Crores INR. PK is a Co-Principal Investigator in a project approved at the Europe Union FP7 which is about 5.3 million Euros. PK has received research funds from Government of India, National Science Foundation (NSF), USA, industry bodies in India, and International Development Research Centre. He is serving as a PC member in prestigious conferences like WWW, AsiaCCS and he is also serving as a reviewer for International Journal of Information Security and ACM's Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT). PK’s Ph.D. thesis work on anti-phishing research at Carnegie Mellon University has contributed in creating an award winning start-up Wombat Security Technologies wombatsecurity.com. PK founded and manages PreCog, precog.iiitd.edu.in a research group at IIIT-Delhi. More information at http://precog.iiitd.edu.in/index.html

Talk description: With increase in usage of the Internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Orkut, Twitter and Flickr have changed the way Internet is being used. There is a dire need to investigate, study and characterize privacy and security on online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological). Real world scalable systems need to be built to detect and defend security and privacy issues on online social media. I will describe briefly some cool ongoing projects that we have: Twit-Digest, MultiOSN, Finding Nemo, OCEAN, Privacy in India, and Call Me MayBe. Many of our research work is made available for public use through tools or online services. Our work derives techniques from Data Mining, Text Mining, Statistics, Network Science, Public Policy, Complex networks, Human Computer Interaction, and Psychology. In particular, in this talk, I will focus on the following: (1) Twit-Digest is a tool to extract intelligence from Twitter which can be useful to security analysts. Twit-Digest is backed by award-winning research publications in international and national venues. (2) MultiOSN is a platform to analyze multiple OSM services to gain intelligence on a given topic / event of interest (2) OCEAN: Open source Collation of eGovernment data and Networks Here, we show how publicly available information on Government services can be used to profile citizens in India. This work obtained the Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013 and it has gained a lot of traction in Indian media. (3) In Finding Nemo, given an identity in one online social media, we are interested in finding the digital foot print of the user in other social media services, this is also called digital identity stitching problem. This work is also backed by award-winning research publication. I will be more than happy to clarify, discuss, any of our work indetail, as required, after the talk.