Keynote Speakers

Keynote : Privacy and Security Challenges in Federated Learning

Ling Liu is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. She directs the research programs in the Distributed Data Intensive Systems Lab (DiSL), examining various aspects of large scale big data-powered artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and machine learning (ML) algorithms and analytics, including performance, availability, privacy, security and trust. Prof. Liu is an elected IEEE Fellow, a recipient of IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2012), and a recipient of the best paper award from numerous top venues, including IEEE ICDCS, WWW, ACM/IEEE CCGrid, IEEE Cloud, IEEE ICWS. Prof. Liu served on editorial board of over a dozen international journals, including the editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Service Computing (2013-2016), and the editor in chief of ACM Transactions on Internet Computing (since 2019). Prof. Liu is a frequent keynote speaker in top-tier venues in Big Data, AI and ML systems and applications, Cloud Computing, Services Computing, Privacy, Security and Trust. Her current research is primarily supported by USA National Science Foundation under CISE programs, IBM and CISCO.

Keynote: While you use Machine Learning for Preventive and predictive Modeling and Magnifying Your Expertise: Challenges and Solutions

Amir H. Razavi holds a Master’s degree in computer software engineering from Tehran university focused on Search engine design and optimization. He received his Ph.D. on Machine learning and NLP from the University of Ottawa under the supervision of Prof. Stan Matwin in February 2012. He also has done 2.5 years of Post-Doctoral fellowship in social network analytics and NLP to improve his practical experience and skills in ML, NLP and Data Mining. Then after, for more than 6 years he is working as Senior Data Scientist and team lead on BigData analytics in general; and User profiling and Cyber Security including Behavioral analysis, CTI, Data Loss Prevention, Fraud detection, and Cyber Attack Prevention/ Detection specifically, at well-known companies such as Bell Canada and Blackberry. He was also project manager of 3 enterprise projects of Customer Care, Billing and Fraud management at telco company.

Keynote: Strengthening the Cybersecurity of the Smart Grid

Mourad Debbabi is a Full Professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering and Interim Dean at the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science, Concordia University. He holds the NSERC/Hydro-Quebec Thales Senior Industrial Research Chair in Smart Grid Security and the Hon. Concordia Research Chair Tier I in Information Systems Security. He is a member of CATAAlliance’s Cybercrime Advisory Council. He serves/served on the boards of Canadian Police College, PROMPT Québec, and Calcul Québec. He was also a member of the Cybersecurity Advisory Board to the Minister for Government Digital Transformation. He is the founder and one of the leaders of the Security Research Centre at Concordia University. Dr. Debbabi holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science from Paris-XI Orsay, University, France. He published 7 books and more than 300 peer-reviewed research articles in international journals and conferences on cybersecurity, cyber forensics, smart grid, privacy, cryptographic protocols, threat intelligence generation, malware analysis, reverse engineering, specification and verification of safety-critical systems, programming languages, and type theory. He supervised to successful completion 33 Ph.D. students, 76 Master students, and 14 Postdoctoral Fellows. He served as a Senior Scientist at the Panasonic Information and Network Technologies Laboratory, Princeton, New Jersey, USA; Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of Laval University, Canada; Senior Scientist at General Electric Research Center, New York, USA; Research Associate at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University, California, USA; and Permanent Researcher at the Bull Corporate Research Center, Paris, France.

Keynote: The Future of Women in Cybersecurity

Ms. Kearney has been serving the cybersecurity community for over two decades securing networks, systems and data for hundreds of companies around the globe. In 2009, she started her own cybersecurity consulting practice which provides technical and business expertise to Canada’s largest security providers while working with governments, academia and fortune 500 companies. Lisa has a degree in computer science, numerous certifications and is active within the cybersecurity community. She keeps up to date on the latest trends and attack vectors currently used to compromise organizations and breach data and uses that information for threat hunting exercises. She continues to developed new products, services and processes to address the increasing threat levels of targeted attacks which affects Canada’s national and economic security.

Early in 2018, Lisa founded the Women CyberSecurity Society (WCS2) which provides support through programs and services to women and minorities interested in a cybersecurity career. The society’s mission is to advance and retain women and minorities within the industry to positions of leadership and decision making.

By working with strategic partners across industry, academia and government, they hope to increase the representation of those underrepresented groups to 30% by 2025.

WCS2 offers memberships, mentoring, coaching, scholarships, training, career development, and more to address the growing demands throughout the industry.