Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu
- Professor of Computer Science
- Ashbel Smith Professor
The University of Texas at Dallas supports the Ashbel Smith Professorship. Dr. Ashbel Smith was the first president of the UT System Board of Regents. He had a long and distinguished career in medicine, education and public service. During his term on the Board of Regents, Smith was dedicated to recruiting the best faculty members available and to developing a curriculum befitting a “university of the first class.” Smith became known as both the “father of Texas medicine” and the “father of The University of Texas.”
“As data is now widely recognized as the new oil for our digital economy, my research focuses on developing new methods and algorithms so we can use this essential resource without sacrificing security and individual privacy.”
The ever-expanding amounts of data that are nowadays collected online offer endless opportunities for businesses, health care providers, researchers and, unfortunately, also for cybercriminals.
Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu’s research focuses on developing novel techniques to protect the privacy and security of data continuously created and stored online on platforms, ranging from social media to health records to videoconferencing sites.
“Over the years, I have worked on a broad range of collaborative research projects, aiming to ensure secure and privacy-preserving data storage, querying, sharing and analysis,” Kantarcioglu said. “As a computer scientist whose research agenda is at the interface of cybersecurity, machine learning and data science, I believe that addressing the emerging challenges in data privacy and security is impossible without transcending the conventional disciplinary boundaries and advancing new synergistic initiatives in data science and cybersecurity.”
Kantarcioglu’s research includes developing new algorithms to study how much and what type of information can be extracted from data without sacrificing safety. For example, he received funding through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Rapid Response Research program in 2020 to create an open-source software tool to help policymakers and health care providers determine how much information they can disclose for COVID-19 research without violating patients’ privacy.
In 2020 Kantarcioglu was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2016 he was named an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Member. Other honors include an American Medical Informatics Association Homer R. Warner Award in 2014, a Technical Achievement Award in Intelligence and Security Informatics from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2017, and an ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies Test-of-Time Award in 2019. Some of his research findings have also been transitioned to practice as an open-source software tool addressing pressing privacy issues in health informatics.
Kantarcioglu’s research projects have been supported by the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, the National Security Agency and the National Institutes of Health. He has published more than 170 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
Kantarcioglu joined UT Dallas in 2005. He serves as director of the UT Dallas Data Security and Privacy Lab. He also is a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science Data Privacy Lab and is a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley’s RISELab.
Kantarcioglu received his PhD and master’s degree in computer science from Purdue University, as well as a graduate certificate in statistics. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Middle East Technical University in Turkey.