Amir Houmansadr Associate Professor
College of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Office: 206 CS Building
E-mail: amir (at) cs.umass.edu [Public Key]
Online: Twitter, LinkedIn
I am an associate professor of computer science at UMass Amherst, where I joined in Fall'14 (tenured since Fall'19). My general area of research is network security and privacy, and I am in particular passionate about enhancing privacy on the Internet. To that end, I design and deploy privacy-enhancing technologies such as censorship circumvention systems, analyze network protocols and services (e.g., messaging apps and machine learning APIs) for privacy leakage, and perform theoretical analysis to derive bounds on privacy (e.g., using game theory and information theory). I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012 and I was a postdoctoral scholar for two years at the University of Texas at Austin. Earlier, I received my M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from Sharif University of Technology. I have received several awards including the 2013 IEEE S&P Best Practical Paper Award, a 2015 Google Faculty Research Award, a 2016 NSF CAREER Award, a 2023 DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), and the 2023 Best Practical Paper Award from the FOCI Community.

News!

- 07/10/2023: Our upcomming USENIX Security paper received the 2023 Best Practical Paper Award from the FOCI Community.
- 05/05/2023: Gave the Keynote Talk at ICLR BANDS 2023 Workshop.
- 04/01/2023: Served on a panel at Shasha Seminar for Human Concerns.
- 10/05/2022: Tech Crunch covers GFW Report's findings about TLS censorship.
- 08/11/2022: Received a DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA).
- 07/29/2021: Two finalist proposals for Facebook Privacy-Enhancing Technologies.
- 12/10/2020: Check out my invited blog post on the use of ML for censorship circumvention.
- 10/27/2020: Best Paper Award Runner-up at ACM IMC'20.
- 09/01/2020: Interview with The Wire China on the recent developments of censorship techniques.
- 08/08/2020: ZDNet article on our collaborative study of ESNI censorship.
- 01/23/2020: Three papers accepted at NDSS'20!
- 11/01/2019: DeepCorr is a finalist at the CSAW’19 Applied Research Competition!
- 09/01/2019: Promoted to associate professor with tenure!
- 07/24/2018: Two papers accepted at ACM CCS'18!
- 05/30/2018: I had a TV interview on Net Neutrality!

Service

Technical Program Committee: Organizer:

Courses

   Fall'23: Advanced Information Assurance (CMPSCI 660)