October 2016 – Ram Dantu, professor, UNT Computer Science and Engineering Department, is the only academic to be named a finalist for the D CEOCIO/CTO awards. The magazine gathered outstanding chief information officers, chief technology officers, and others excelling in IT posts across Dallas-Fort Worth for one night of celebration and high-level networking on Sept. 27 at the Hilton Anatole to raise a glass to the trailblazers and innovators changing the Dallas technology-business landscape.
Dantu was named "Outstanding Technology Advocate" at the inaugural D CEO CIO/CTO awards ceremony. A partnership between D CEO magazine and the Information Systems Security Association, the program honors chief information officers, chief technology officers and other in top IT posts in the North Texas region. Dr. Dantu thanked all of his past and present students in the Network Security Lab and said they are the reason for the recognition.
D CEO, a publication of D Magazine, will recognize Dantu and other top information and technology officers as finalists in its October issue.
Dantu, the director of the Center for Information and Computer Security at UNT since 2003, researches wireless networks and network security. Dr. Dantu also is heading a team of six students participating in a “Scholarship for Service” program through the National Science Foundation, giving the group more than $1 million in funding. The money from NSF pays for the students to complete their doctoral degrees as long as they agree to work for a federal organization in the field once they graduate. The team is now researching cybersecurity aspects such as insider threats, intrusion detection, health information technology and data breaches.
Here is the complete list of finalists for 2016.
Pamela Arora, Children’s Medical Center
Renee Arrington, Pearson Partners International
Ellen Barker, Texas Instruments
Kristen Blum, Frito-Lay
Paul Browne, Tenet Healthcare
John Carmack, Oculus
Matt Chambers, Baylor Scott & White Health
Amy Czuchlewski, Bottle Rocket
Ram Dantu, UNT Center for Information and Computer Security
Laura Rea Dickey, Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants Inc.
Mandy Edwards, CBRE
Eric Fisch, Texas Capital Bank
Mark Haney, ExamSoft Worldwide
Zack Hicks, Toyota Motor North America
Steve Holland, 7-Eleven
Deborah Kerr, Sabre
Maya Leibman, American Airlines
Andrew Macaulay, Topgolf
Ed Robben, Fossil Inc.
Ravi Sathyanna, Brainspace
John Scheibe, Tolleson Wealth Management
Jeff Schilling, Armor
Dr. Ram Dantu has 15 years of industrial experience in the networking industry, where he worked for Cisco, Nortel, Alcatel, and Fujitsu and was responsible for advanced technology products from concept to delivery. During 2011, he was a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the School of Engineering. He is the founding director of the Network Security Laboratory at UNT, the objective of which is to study the problems and issues related to next-generation networks. He is also the director of the Center for Information and Computer Security at UNT. He has received several NSF awards as the primary investigator in collaboration with Columbia University, Purdue University, University of California at Davis, Texas A&M University and MIT. During the last six years he received 10 research awards from the National Science Foundation for a total of $5 million. He was selected as a member of Innovation Corps of NSF in 2011.
Dr. Ram Dantu's research includes security and safety in mobile applications in health care and transportation sectors. In addition, he has been researching on the prevention of DoS and spam attacks in the VoIP networks. Prior to UNT, he was a technology director at Netrake (a startup acquired by Audio Codes), where he was the architect of the redundancy mechanism for VoIP firewalls. His additional experience includes being a technical director at IPMobile, a startup acquired by Cisco, where he was instrumental in the wireless/IP product concept, architecture, design, and delivery. In addition to more than 150 research papers, he has authored several Requests For Comments, RFCs, related to MultiProtocol Label Switching, SS7 over IP, and routing. Due to his innovative work, Cisco and Alcatel were granted a total of 25 patents, and another 10 are pending. He has co-chaired three workshops on voice over internet protocol, VoIP, security. For the last two years he has been organizing the workshop Security on the Move and in the Clouds, SoMiC, at UNT.