Faculty

The PI, Dr. Zhi-li Zhang received the B.S. degree in computer science from Nanjing University, China, in 1986 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Massachusetts in 1992 and 1997. In 1997 he joined the Computer Science and Engineering faculty at the University of Minnesota, where he is currently an Associate Professor. Dr. Zhang’s research interests include computer communications and networks, especially the QoS, routing and security issues in Internet, wireless networks and multimedia systems. He is co-recipient of an ACM SIGMETRICS best paper award and an IEEE ICNP best paper award. Dr. Zhang is an associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and Computer Networks. He has served on technical program committees for many con-ferences/workshops including ACM SIGCOMM, SIGMETRICS, IEEE INFOCOM and IEEE ICNP. He is/was co-chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2006 and IWQoS’04. Dr. Zhang received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1997, U. of Minnesota McKnight Land-grant Professorship in 2000, and George Taylor Distinguished Research Award in 2005.

The co-PI, Dr. Yongdae Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received Ph. D. degree from USC in May 2002 under the guidance of Dr. Gene Tsudik: his dissertation focused on group key management on peer groups. Before joining to Univ. of Minnesota, he was a research staff at UC Irvine (2001–2002) and ETRI, Korea (1993–1998). His current research interests include: group key management on peer groups, security issues for networks and distributed systems such as storage systems, P2P systems, sensor networks, database. He has over 20 refereed journal and conference publications. He has serverd on technical program commitees for many conference/workshops including IEEE Infocom, ICDCS and IACR Asiacrypt. Dr. Kim received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2005, and U. of Minnesota McKnight Land-grant Professorship in 2006.

The co-PI, Dr. Nicholas Hopper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in August 2004 under the guidance of Professor Manuel Blum; his dissertation gave a cryptographic formalization of steganography which resulted in the first provably secure stegosystems and the first nontrivial lower and upper bounds on steganographic rate. His current research interests include foundations of cryptography, steganography, anonymity, and human interactive proofs. Dr. Hopper received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006.

Dr. Andrew Odlyzko is Professor in the department of Mathematics, and Director of the Digital Technology Center. He has written over 150 technical papers in computational complexity, cryptography, number theory, combinatorics, coding theory, analysis, probability theory, and related fields, and has three patents. In recent years he has also been working on electronic publishing, electronic commerce, and economics of data networks. He has an honorary doctorate from Univ. Marne la vallee and serves on editorial boards of over 20 technical journals, as well as on several advisory and supervisory board.

Dr. Vipin Kumar is currently the head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include High Performance computing, data mining, and their applications to information assurance. He has authored over 200 research articles, and co-edited or coauthored nine books including the widely used text book Introduction to Parallel Computing, and an upcoming edited collection, Managing Cyber Threats: Issues, Approaches and Challenges to be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kumar has served as chair/co-chair for many conferences/workshops in the area of data mining and parallel computing, including IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (2002) and 15th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (2001). Kumar serves as the chair of the steering committee of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, and is a member of the steering committee of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. Kumar serves or has served on on the editorial boards of Knowledge and Information Systems, IEEE Computational Intelligence Bulletin, Annual Review of Intelligent Informatics, Parallel Computing, the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, IEEE Transactions of Data and Knowledge Engineering (93–97), IEEE Concurrency (1997–2000), and IEEE Parallel and Distributed Technology (1995–1997). He is a Fellow of IEEE, a member of SIAM, and ACM, and a Fellow of the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute.

Dr. Jaideep Srivastava is a professor on the faculty of the University of Minnesota. Between 1999 and 2001 he took a two-year leave, during which he spent time at Amazon.com and at Yodlee Inc. This wide-ranging industry experience has provided him with a unique perspective on the application of various computer science technologies in various kinds of Web-based services. As a researcher, educator, consultant, and invited speaker in the areas of data mining, databases, artificial intelligence, and multimedia for over 15 years, Dr. Srivastava continues his active collaboration with the technology industry, both for research and technology transfer. Dr. Srivastava has supervised 20 Ph.D. dissertations and 39 MS theses, and has authored/co-authored over 175 papers in journals and conferences. He has chaired/co-chaired a number of conferences, and is on the editorial board of many journals. Dr. Srivastava received his B.Tech. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology -Kanpur, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California -Berkeley. He has been elected an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to Computer Science research.

Dr. Anand Tripathi received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1978 and 1980, and B.Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in 1972. His research interests are in distributed systems, middleware architectures, collaboration systems, pervasive computing, system security, and fault-tolerant computing. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. During 1981-84 he worked as a Senior Principal Research Scientist at Honeywell Computer Science Center, Minneapolis. He joined the University of Minnesota in 1984. During 1995-97, he served as a Program Director in the Division of Computer and Communications Research at the National Science Foundation. Currently, he is serving as an at-large member of the IEEE Computer Society Publications Board (2001-2006), and member of the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Pervasive Computing, and IEEE Distributed Systems Online. He was the Program Chair for the IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems in 2001, IEEE Workshop on Mobile Distributed C omputing (MDC) held in June 2003, and the Second IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom) 2004. He was one of the organizers of two ECOOP (European Conference on Object Oriented Programming) Workshops on exception handling (2000 and 2003), and co-editor for a Springer LNCS volume on exception handling, published in 2002. He served as a guest co-editor of two special issues of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering on exception handling (Sept-Oct 2000). Currently he is serving as a co-editor for a special issues of Kluwer’s Wireless Networks and Applications (December 2004), and Elsevier’s Pervasive and Mobile Computing (Spring 2005). He has served on the program committees of more than 50 conferences and workshops.

Dr. Mats Heimdahl was appointed Director of the University of Minnesota Software Engineering Center in January 2004. Mats Heimdahl earned a M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine. He is currently a McKnight Presidential Fellow and an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award, a McKnight Land-Grant Professorship and the McKnight Presidential Fellow award at the University of Minnesota, and the University of Minnesota Award for Outstanding Contributions to Post-Baccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education. His research interests are in software engineering, safety critical systems, software safety, testing, requirements engineering, formal specification languages, and automated analysis of specifications. He is currently pursuing his interest in the following areas: Static analysis of system and software requirements, for example, through model checking and theorem proving; how dynamic methods, for example, simulation and testing, can be used to validate requirements specifications; model based software development; automated test case generation; and software certification.

Dr. Paul Garrett received his Ph.D. in 1977 from Princeton University. He was on the faculty at Yale and Stanford, and had a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at U.C. Berkeley, prior to coming to Minnesota in 1982. He has supervised the work of 13 Ph.D. students, 26 REU students, and seven senior projects. His main research interests are in number theory, its applications, and related parts of mathematics, such as automorphic forms and representation theory. In addition to various research articles, he has written research monographs Buildings and Classical Groups (1997) and Holomorphic Hilbert Modular Forms (1990), an introductory text on cryptography (2000), an introductory text on information theory and coding (2003), as well as notes for functional analysis, abstract algebra, and calculus.

Dr. Laura Gurak is a nationally recognized scholar in technical communication and Internet research. She is Professor and Department Head in the Rhetoric Department at the University of Minnesota. She co-directs the Internet Studies Center and is one of six non-law faculty at the University to hold the title of Faculty Fellow in the Law School. She received her Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994. Her specialties include rhetoric of technology, intellectual property, ethics and privacy, and Internet studies. She has published numerous book chapters and articles and two sole-authored books, Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace and Cyberliteracy, both with Yale University Press. She is also author of two leading textbooks in technical communication as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

Dr. Dan L. Burk is the Oppenheimer, Wolf and Donnelly Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses in Patent, Copyright, and related topics. An internationally prominent authority on issues related to high technology, he is perhaps best known for his work in the area of “cyberlaw,” where he has been a leading figure in the debates surrounding Internet jurisdiction, trespass to computers, and the deployment of digital rights management systems. Professor Burk holds a B.S.(1985) in Microbiology from Brigham Young University, an M.S. (1987) in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from Northwestern University, a J.D. (1990) from Arizona State University, and a J.S.M. (1994) from Stanford University. He has taught high technology law at many prominent institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley; Cornell University; University of Tilburg, University of Toronto; the Max Planck Institute at Munich; St. Anne’s College, Oxford; and the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Piacenza, Italy.