People
Meet the educators of the Information Security program
Dr. Michael Jacobson (Program Director)
Michael Jacobson is a professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Calgary. His main research interests are computational number theory and applications to public-key cryptography. In addition to fundamental questions in computational number theory, his research deals with cryptographic protocols based on certain number theoretic structures, aiming to improve their efficiency and better understand their security. By working towards more efficient algorithms for arithmetic in class groups of number fields and algebraic curves, we achieve faster cryptosystems. By studying problems such as the discrete logarithm problem in these settings through algorithm development and benchmarking, we achieve a better understanding of the security of these systems in practice.
Dr. Ken Barker
Ken Barker is a professor of computer science with research interest in system integration, distributed systems and the privacy and security of data repositories. He has served as the dean of the faculty of science and as head of computer science at the University of Calgary. He is the director of the University of Calgary’s Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance (ISPIA) and the president of the Alberta body of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS Alberta). He is a past president of the Canadian Association of Computer Science (CACS/AIC) and has served on the Computer Science Accreditation Council. He has served as the Dean of the Faculty of Science and as the Department Head of Computer Science at the University of Calgary.
Dr. Pavol Federl
Pavol Federl is an Assistant Professor (Teaching) in the Department of Computer Science where he teaches courses on variety of topics, including operating systems, network security, data science and web-based application design. Before becoming an instructor, he worked in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, designing and implementing a web-accessible software for visualization and analysis of large multi-dimensional radio astronomy data sets.
Dr. Philip Fong
Philip Fong is an expert in Access Control and Application-Level Security. He is internationally recognized for his work in Relationship-Based Access Control and History-Based Access Control. His recent research projects concern protection technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as access control models for data analytics platforms. He is the Director of the Information Security Programs at the University of Calgary, a Canada Research Chair in Software Security since 2009, a recipient of the NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplements, and a longtime program committee member for the ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, and the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies.
Dr. Marina Gavrilova
Marina L Gavrilova is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, the co-director of the Biometric Technologies Laboratory and is founding Editor-in-Chief of Transactions on Computational Sciences Journal, Springer. Her research interests include biometric and cybersecurity, machine intelligence, cognitive systems, pattern recognition, activity and motion analysis, social biometrics, biometric privacy, multi-modal systems and their applications in public spheres.
Dr. Ryan Henry
Ryan Henry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research explores the systems challenges of applied cryptography, with an emphasis on using cryptography to build secure systems that preserve the privacy of their users. In addition to designing and analyzing privacy-enhancing systems, Dr. Henry is interested in practical matters like implementing and working toward the deployment of such systems, as well as more theoretical matters like devising number-theoretic attacks against non-standard cryptographic assumptions and developing new models and theories to understand just how efficient "heavy-weight" cryptographic primitives can be. Prior to joining the University of Calgary, Dr. Henry spent four years as faculty at Indiana University Bloomington, where he received the Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award and three competitive research grants from the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Joel Reardon
Joel Reardon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research focuses on cybersecurity, an area in which he holds extensive domain knowledge, particularly as it relates to smartphones. In 2018, he co-founded AppCensus Inc., incorporated in California. This company provides privacy analytics as a service and is directly spun out of Dr. Reardon’s own research along with collaborators. AppCensus’ AppSearch service analyzes free publicly-available Android apps, and reports the private and personally identifying information that different apps access and share with other parties over the Internet. The company has already procured statements of work from Consumer Reports and a Fortune 500 company, and the team is in discussions with a number of other companies, government regulators, and non-profit watchdogs interested in their work.
Dr. Rei Safavi-Naini
Rei Safavi-Naini is the NSERC/Telus Industry Research Chair in Information Security, and the AITF Strategic Chair in Information Security. She is a co-founder of the Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance at the University of Calgary and served as its Director until December 2018. Before joining the University of Calgary in 2007 as the iCORE Chair in Information Security, she was a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of Telecommunication and Information Technology Research Institute (now ICT Research Institute) at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her current research interests are information theoretic security, quantum-safe cryptography, cryptography for cloud security, network security and security of the Internet of Things and distributed ledger systems.
Dr. Renate Scheidler
Renate Scheidler holds a dual appointment as a professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics and the Department of Computer Science. Her research interests include number theory and its applications to information security, focusing on algorithms and computations in algebraic number theory, arithmetic geometry and cryptography. She is a founding member of the University of Calgary’s Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance (ISPIA).