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Portrait of Amir Houmansadr

Amir Houmansadr

Professor
Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Email: amir (at) cs.umass.edu [ Public Key ]; Office: 206

Online: Twitter · LinkedIn

Bio: I am a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I have been a faculty member since Fall 2014 (tenured in Fall 2019). I received my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana‑Champaign in 2012 and subsequently spent two years as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, I earned my M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from Sharif University of Technology.

Research Area: My research focuses on network and AI security and privacy , with particular emphasis on privacy‑enhancing technologies and trustworthy AI . I design and deploy censorship circumvention systems, analyze network protocols and services (e.g., messaging platforms and machine‑learning APIs) for privacy leakage, use theoretical tools such as game theory and information theory to derive privacy bounds, and evaluate the security and privacy of emerging AI technologies.

Research Team: I lead the Secure, Private Internet (SPIN) Research Group and co‑lead the UMass AI Security Lab .

Selected Awards

News

  • 2017-08-22: Received a collaborative NSF Award to investigate IoT Privacy!
  • 2017-08-02: 2/2 papers accepted at ACM CCS'17! Congrats to my students Hadi and Milad!
  • 2017-05-15: Received a collaborative NSF/Intel Award to investigate future network architectures!
  • 2017-04-07: Spoke at a panel at the Obfuscation Workshop at NYU.
  • 2016-12-09: Moderated a panel on Internet censorship at ACSAC 2016 .
  • 2016-11-09: Keynote on Internet censorship at SBSeg 2016 in Niteroi, Brazil.
  • 2016-07-25: Received a collaborative Medium NSF Award to investigate Covert Communications!
  • 2016-07-23: 2/2 papers accepted at CCS'16! Congrats to my students, Hadi and Milad!
  • 2016-02-25: Book on Information Hiding is published!
  • 2016-01-27: Received an NSF CAREER Award !
  • 2015-12-16: Co‑chaired the 2016 USENIX Workshop on FOCI!
  • 2015-11-20: MIT Technology Review article on CacheBrowser.
  • 2015-07-24: Received an NSF Award to investigate statistical traffic analysis.
  • 2015-02-12: Awarded a Google Faculty Research Award .
  • 2014-05-16: Joining Computer Science at UMass Amherst as an Assistant Professor in the Fall.
  • 2013-11-25: Paper accepted at NDSS 2014: "No Direction Home: The True Cost of Routing Around Decoys."
  • 2013-05-21: Paper won the Best Practical Paper award at IEEE S&P 2013.
  • 2013-01-28: Paper accepted at IEEE S&P 2013: "The Parrot is Dead: Observing Unobservable Network Communications."
  • 2012-10-20: Paper accepted at NDSS 2013: "I want my voice to be heard: IP over VoIP for unobservable censorship circumvention."
  • 2012-07-09: Joined the University of Texas at Austin as a postdoc.
  • 2011-09-01: Featured on UIUC ECE and CSL websites.
  • 2011-07-21: Interviewed by New Scientist about Stegobot .
  • 2011-07-15: Paper Cirripede accepted to ACM CCS 2011.

Service

Leadership Roles

Technical Program Committees

Technical Program Committees

Other Service

  • Posters Committee: CODASPY 2015
  • Guest editor: EURASIP Journal on Information Security (Special Issue on Advances in Digital Forensics)
  • Reviewer: ACM TISSEC; IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking; IEEE TMC; ACM TAAS; Elsevier Computers & Security; Elsevier Journal of Systems and Software; International Journal of Communication Systems; International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems; Journal of Computer Networks and Communications
  • External reviewer: CCS'08, ICDCS'09, CCS'09, IEEE S&P'10, WPES'11, CCS'11, NDSS'12, USENIX Security'12, NDSS'13, PETS'13, HotPETs'13
  • Graduate Representative: ECE Student Advisory Committee (ECESAC), UIUC, 2011–2012

Courses