Sagar Samtani

Dr. Sagar Samtani is an Assistant Professor and Grant Thornton Scholar in the Department of Operations and Decision Technologies at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University (2020 – Present). He is also a Fellow within the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR) at IU. Prior to joining IU, Samtani served as an Assistant Professor in the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida (2018 – 2020).

Samtani graduated with his Ph.D. in May 2018. His dissertation was supervised by Dr. Hsinchun Chen in the Artificial Intelligence Lab in University of Arizona’s Management Information Systems (MIS) department within the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona (UArizona). He also earned his MS in MIS and BSBA in 2014 and 2013, respectively, from UArizona. From 2014 – 2017, Samtani served as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarship-for-Service (SFS) Fellow.

Samtani’s research centers around Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity and cyber threat intelligence (CTI). Selected recent topics include deep learning, network science, and text mining approaches for smart vulnerability assessment, scientific cyberinfrastructure security, open source software security, and Dark Web analytics. Samtani has published over forty journal, conference, and workshop papers on these topics in leading venues such as MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Computers and Security, IEEE Security and Privacy, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, and others. His research has received funding from the NSF Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI), CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII), and Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Education (SaTC-EDU) programs.

He has co-founded workshops on AI for Cybersecurity topics at IEEE ICDM and ACM KDD. He also serves as a Program Committee member or Program Chair of leading AI for cybersecurity and CTI conferences and workshops, including IEEE S&P Deep Learning Workshop, USENIX ScAINet, ACM CCS AISec, and IEEE ISI. He has also served as a Guest Editor on topics pertaining to AI for Cybersecurity at IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) and other leading journals. He is currently an Associate Editor at Information and Management. Dr. Samtani also serves as a special advisor and/or on the Executive Advisory Council of leading entities in the cybersecurity industry, including the CompTIA ISAO.

Dr. Samtani has won several awards for his research, including Best Paper Awards ACM SIGMIS (ICIS) Doctoral Dissertation Award. He has also won awards and recognition for his teaching efforts, including the IU FACET Mumford Excellence in Extraordinary Teaching Award, IU Trustees Teaching Award (nominee), and James F. Lasalle Award for Teaching Excellence. Samtani has received media attention from outlets such as Miami Herald, Fox, Science Magazine, AAAS, and the Penny Hoarder. He is a member of AIS, ACM, IEEE, INFORMS, and INNS.