Accolades is an occasional News Center feature that highlights recent accomplishments of The University of Texas at Dallas faculty and students. To submit items for consideration, contact your school’s communication manager.
Thuraisingham Receives IEEE Award for Research Work
Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Founders Chair in Engineering and Computer Science and executive director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, was honored with the 2019 Communications and Information Security Technical Recognition Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society.
The award recognizes outstanding and pioneering research contributions to the technical advancement of applying data science techniques for network security problems. Thuraisingham, one of the world’s leading experts in data security and data mining, accepted the honor in December at the 2019 IEEE Global Communications Conference in Hawaii.
“I believe that as more progress is made on analyzing massive amounts of data and we learn more about the types of attacks on networks, we have the opportunity to solve challenging problems in secure data science,” Thuraisingham said in a presentation at the conference.
In 2018, Thuraisingham was named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the National Academy of Inventors.
Banner Named to Global Commission on Digital Health
Dr. Olivia Banner, assistant professor in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, has been named to an international commission on the convergence of digital health, artificial intelligence and universal health coverage.
Banner is one of 17 global experts serving on the Governing Health Futures 2030: Growing Up in a Digital World Commission. The commission, a joint project of The Lancet and Financial Times, is tasked with exploring how digital developments and artificial intelligence can support universal health coverage and improve the health and well-being of all people, especially children and young people.
The commissioners bring expertise in global and public health, economics, technology, e-health, and health care delivery. They will collaborate over the next two years to understand the emerging digital health ecosystem and to create policy recommendations that support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Banner, whose research and teaching sit at the intersections of media, disability studies and digital culture, said she will be looking at digital health from a humanist perspective.
“My contribution will be to keep a focus on the fact that data is not always used in ways that empower people,” she said. “With more and more health data available through people’s use of digital technologies, with little governance or oversight of that data’s use, and with paternalistic rather than empowering models for technology development, it’s crucial that the commission considers how this data can be used to help people help themselves, especially vulnerable populations.”