BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – As artificial intelligence applications continue to evolve and become more integral as a tool for individuals, governments, and businesses to make decisions more quickly and efficiently, the potential for its misuse and the need for its security and privacy also grow.
Sagar Samtani, associate professor of information systems and Weimer Faculty Fellow at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, has been named a founding co-editor-in-chief of a new academic journal that will address those issues, ACM Transactions on Artificial Intelligence Security and Privacy.
Sagar Samtani
ACM Transactions journals are supported by the Association for Computing Machinery, which has more than 110,000 members worldwide, and are “excellent journals for publishing computational and computer science research,” said Samtani, who also leads Kelley’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that develops practical data science and AI-enabled analytics methods and systems for societally relevant applications.
“We could not have brought this opportunity to Kelley without strong support from the school and its information systems faculty,” he said. “The Kelley School has truly provided a spectacular arena to pursue a range of targeted scholarly efforts around a systematic and emerging area of AI security and privacy. I am looking forward to a hopefully successful journal experience and continued momentum in this important and emerging area.”
Having Kelley faculty helping to frame the conversation on issues through their roles as journal editors, particularly in an emergent area such as AI security and privacy, is another example of the school’s role in preparing its constituents for perpetual change brought on by technological advancement, said Pat Hopkins, dean of the Kelley School and the Conrad Prebys Professor.
“Sagar’s pioneering and impactful work strengthens Kelley’s reputation as a leader in addressing critical national needs in these rapidly evolving fields, and this appointment is a testament to the importance of his scholarly contributions,” Hopkins said.
Dean Patrick Hopkins
“Artificial intelligence, in its myriad variations and complex forms, has been a top priority for us at Kelley. Our stellar faculty across disciplines have been monitoring the latest developments and continuously collaborating on best practices as systems evolve,” he added. “Kelley is therefore the perfect ecosystem for Sagar’s work, and we look forward to the many ways his work continues to shape international discourse around AI, to safeguard systems against misuse, and to ensure that critical advances benefit society as a whole.”
Working with students and faculty collaborators from across the IU Bloomington campus, Samtani focuses his research on building AI techniques to address issues in cybersecurity, mental health analytics and business intelligence.
“Through the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and journal related activities, Kelley will be well-positioned to help our nation to meet the needs of the ever-growing market need for professionals who understand AI and cybersecurity,” Samtani said. “The breadth and depth of research in these areas at Kelley, combined with the National Science Foundation support we have received, well positions us for the future and our students.”
Samtani also was among those convened by the National Science Foundation and NSA National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity Program for a series of workshops to develop educational programs for AI for cybersecurity (AICyber) and the security of AI (SecureAI).
Samtani, who joined the Kelley School in 2020, developed one of the nation’s first courses related to AI for cybersecurity. has been a principal investigator or a co-PI for more than a dozen sponsored research awards totaling more than $8 million since earning his doctorate in 2018 from the University of Arizona.
In 2022, he received the Association for Information Systems’ AIS Early Career Award, which also recognizes individuals in the early stages of their careers who have already made outstanding research, teaching, or service contributions to information systems. He was the first Kelley faculty member to receive the award from AIS, which also has recognized him as a Distinguished Member. Last year, he was the Kelley School’s first recipient of a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.
The new journal’s other co-editors-in-chief include Patrick McDaniel, the Tsun-Ming Shih Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin and a leading voice in the AI security community, and Murat Kantarcioglu, professor of data and decision sciences and faculty fellow of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative at Virginia Tech University. The journal is expected to be open for submissions in summer 2025.