V.S. Subrahmanian

V.S. Subrahmanian is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science at the McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University and Buffett Faculty Fellow at the Northwestern Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Prior to this, Subrahmanian was The Dartmouth College Distinguished Professor in Cybersecurity, Technology, and Society at Dartmouth College with tenure in the Computer Science Department and Director of the Institute for Security, Technology and Society (ISTS). Prior to joining Dartmouth, he was a tenured Professor in the University of Maryland's Computer Science Department.He served a 6.5 year stint as Director of the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies where he co-founded the Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics and founded the Center for Digital International Government. His work stands squarely at the intersection of big data analytics for increased security, policy, and business needs. Prof. Subrahmanian has been an invited speaker at the United Nations, Capitol Hill, the Mumbai Stock Exchange, and numerous other prestigious forums.

Prof. Subrahmanian is one of the world leaders in logical reasoning with uncertainty, probabilistic logics, temporal probabilistic logics, and managing huge, heterogeneous databases with incomplete and inconsistent information, and multimedia databases. In recent years, he has developed scalable methods to apply probabilistic models to a wide variety of real-world scenarios. He created the field of computational cultural dynamics with a suite of novel methods to analyze the behaviors of terrorist groups and applied them to making forecasts and suggesting policies to shape behaviors of groups like Hezbollah, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Indian Mujahideen. These methods have since been applied to a variety of problems including predicting the stability of nations, predicting when protests will turn violent, predicting systemic banking crises in countries, predicting spread of malware in countries, predicting health care outcomes and in manufacturing. In combination with social network analysis, these methods have also been used to identify bad actors on social media, forecast diffusion in social media, and suggest methods to influence social networks. Prof. Subrahmanian led the team that won DARPA's Twitter Influence Bot Detection Challenge under their SMISC program and was a member of the team that won the NIMH-funded Harvard Med School/SUNY Albany NGRID Challenge to automatically quantify the intensity of psychological symptoms in clinical notes. Prof. Subrahmanian is one of the world leaders in the design, analysis, and application of big data analytics to real world problems so that optimal decisions can be made by governments and companies. In cyber-security, Prof. Subrahmanian developed some of the first secure query processing algorithms, flexible authentication frameworks, unexplained behavior detection and scalable detection of known threats. His Global Cyber-Vulnerability Report published in January, 2016, characterizes the cyber-risk of 44 countries by studying data across 44 hosts per year and over 20 Billion telemetry and malware reports.

In addition to his academic work, Prof. Subrahmanian has served for 2 years (2013, 2014) on the US-India Strategic Dialog (track 2), the India-Israel track 2/dialog (2013, 2014), the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and DARPA”s Executive Advisory Council on their Advanced Logistics Program. He serves currently on the Research Advisory Board of Tata Consultancy Services (India’s biggest software firm), the Board of Directors of the Development Gateway (created by the World Bank in 1999), and Sentimetrix, Inc., a big data analytics firm, and CosmosId, a leading bioinformatics company. He serves on the boards of numerous journals including Science, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems & Technology, ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, and IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems.

Education

• PhD in Computer Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
• MS in Computer Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
• MSc (Tech.) in Computer Science, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India

Research Interests

V.S. Subrahmanian focuses on the intersection of AI and security problems. He develops machine learning based models to analyze text/geospatial/relational/social network data, learn behavioral models from the data, forecast actions, and influence outcomes. His models have been used to forecast terror attacks and terror network evolution, to reduce poaching, to identify bad actors on social media, to forecast systemic banking crises, to maximize airline profits, to predict if apps are malware or not, and more.