Ebert selected as director for CERIAS in Discovery Park

David Ebert, the Silicon Valley Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, has been appointed director of Discovery Park's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, effective Aug. 1. Ebert has served as interim director since November 2018.

“We are very pleased to appoint David Ebert as director of CERIAS,” says Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, chief scientific officer and senior vice president for strategic initiatives. “He has shown exceptional ability as interim director this past year and it is only fitting that he should continue to lead CERIAS into the future.”

CERIAS is widely considered as one of the world's leading centers for research and education in areas in cyber and cyber-physical systems with research focus on security, resiliency, privacy, autonomy, trusted systems, and explainable artificial intelligence. A multifaceted approach combines technical strength with ethical, legal, educational, economic, linguistic and communication expertise to create a cross-disciplinary team composed of six colleges and more than 20 departments across the Purdue campus.

Ebert joined Purdue in December 2000 and performs research in visual analytics, data science, explainable and trustable AI, novel visualization techniques, human-computer collaborative decision making, and procedural abstraction of complex, massive data. He has been active in the visualization community, teaching courses, presenting papers, and co-chairing many conference program committees. Ebert is also a faculty director of Purdue's Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments center, known as VACCINE, a Department of Homeland Security emeritus center of excellence. Ebert founded the CERIAS-affiliated VACCINE in 2009 and has been principal investigator since its inception. 

“I am delighted to be able to continue my work with CERIAS,” Ebert says. “I am grateful to be able to work alongside this team of very talented people and to help further the mission of this exceptional organization.”

About Discovery Park

Discovery Park is a place where Purdue researchers move beyond traditional boundaries, collaborating across disciplines and with policymakers and business leaders to create solutions for a better world. Grand challenges of global health, global conflict and security, and those that lie at the nexus of sustainable energy, world food supply, water and the environment are the focus of researchers in Discovery Park. The translation of discovery to impact is integrated into the fabric of Discovery Park through entrepreneurship programs and partnerships.

About CERIAS

The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) is currently viewed as one of the world’s leading centers for research and education in areas of information security that are crucial to the protection of critical computing and communication infrastructure. CERIAS is unique among such national centers in its multidisciplinary approach to the problems, ranging from purely technical issues (e.g., intrusion detection, network security, etc.) to ethical, legal, educational, communicational, linguistic, and economic issues, and the subtle interactions and dependencies among them.

Source: Discovery Park