Faculty

CPI is pleased to announce our new partnership with TAURIA, including the appointing of the CPI-TAURIA Faculty Fellow in Cybersecurity and Privacy to Guang Gong, professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and member of the UWaterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute.

Read about the groundbreaking work of Sujaya Maiyya, an assistant professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and a member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at the University of Waterloo. Sujaya's research focuses on oblivious privacy-preserving databases, aiming to safeguard data from access pattern attacks. Her journey from UC Santa Barbara to the University of Waterloo highlights her remarkable rise in the field, offering solutions to enhance data security and privacy in the face of evolving threats.

Sirisha Rambhatla, an accomplished engineer, attended the College of Engineering (COER) in Roorkee, India, excelling in her studies and interning at prestigious institutions like IIT Roorkee and IIT Kanpur. Her passion for signal processing led her to the University of Minnesota for advanced studies under Dr. Jarvis Haupt. Now an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo, she leads the Critical ML lab, addressing healthcare challenges with AI and ML models while advocating for privacy-conscious approaches.

A chat with Prof. Diogo Barradas about his academic journey, discussing a variety of topics including censorship, digital forensics, security testing, teaching at the University of Waterloo, and more.

This event centres on our theme, “Protecting Diverse Application Domains", which will highlight current and future efforts within the cybersecurity and privacy sphere, with keynote speakers, panel discussions, and industry talks. This conference is open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, entrepreneurs, start ups, government, sponsors, and businesses.

We sat down for a conversation with Gautam Kamath, an assistant professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science in the Faculty of Mathematics and member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, about trust, privacy, and security surrounding machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) models.

The international and geopolitical landscape has become more volatile in recent years with the rise of populist nationalist leaders, a stagnating global economy, a renewed Cold War with Russia and China, and rising regional powers challenging long-held liberal norms.

The impact these forces are having on cybersecurity, technology supply chains, and energy systems, to name just a few domains, will continue to have significant disruptive impacts on business operations, customer relations, and executive decision-making.

In this webinar, Bessma Momani will dissect these and other related issues to help executives navigate this challenging new risk environment.

This virtual conference will focus on the latest developments in cybersecurity and privacy research, gaps hindering the collection of informative data, and the potential of big data generated through mobile and other devices, along with the use of AI methods in healthcare. Additionally, discussions will touch on issues surrounding public trust and its impact on government policy. Representatives from Health Canada and Statistics Canada will also provide observations on research and public policy and how to effectively move forward with research partnerships.

Digital disinformation presents a mounting threat to, and challenge for, liberal democracies. Global events like Brexit, electoral interference, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, have made the abstract threat of digital disinformation into a distinct reality. The shifting global balance of power, characterized by growing multipolarity, is unfolding alongside the expansion of tools, strategies, and spaces for adversarial states and non-state actors to expand their influence, disrupt multilateral diplomacy, threaten liberal democratic norms and values, and de-legitimize a rules-based global order. 

This interdisciplinary workshop will help to bring together awareness among the academic community, industry, civil society, and government, outlining and assessing the evolving threat of digital disinformation while also providing direction and guidance on how to protect liberal democracies like Canada from weaponized digital disinformation.