Ashish Kundu is currently Head of Cybersecurity Research at Cisco Research. Ashish is an IEEE Fellow.  He has also worked as:  Co-founder and CTO at Ciphense, Head of Cybersecurity at Nuro.ai. During 2011-2019, he worked as Research Staff Member,  and Master Inventor and at the IBM T J Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York.  He has led the Research and Development efforts for Security and Compliance for IBM Watson Health Cloud, IBM Watson Education and IBM Watson Genomic Analytics.  Dr. Kundu served on the IBM Research AI Ethics committee during 2015 - 2016. Dr. Kundu received Ph.D. from Computer Science at Purdue University  and then he joined IBM T J Watson Research Center after that. He has been affiliated with CERIAS.  Ashish is an ACM Distinguished Member, an ex-ACM Distinguished Speaker, and a Master Inventor (at IBM Research).  

Research Interests

Dr. Kundu's research interests are  in Security, Privacy and Compliance: 

• Holistic Security: "How to deliver holistic security, privacy, compliance and ethics by weaving fabrics of these requirements with the system together in an intelligent and cognitive manner".

  • Introduced the concept of holistic security in 2011.

  • "Security is the new functionality" , "Holistic security is the need of the future"

Publications & Inventions 

• Patents granted: 150+  

• Patents filed: 160+

• Research publications: 55+

Selected Awards & Honors:

• IBM Patent Achievement, 2019, IBM Research

• Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, 2018, IBM Research

• ACM Distinguished Member, Nov 2017

• IBM Master Inventor (Second time), IBM Research, 2017

• ACM Distinguished Speaker, April 2017.

• Star Alumnus, NIT Rourkela (Alumni Association), 2015

• IBM Master Inventor, IBM Research, 2014 [Purdue story]

• CERIAS Diamond Award for Outstanding Contributions to Cybersecurity Research during Ph.D., Purdue University,  2011

• Top Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of Computer Science, Purdue University,  2011

• Best Student Paper 2006, Best Research Posters (2006, 2007, 2008).

Selected PC/Editorial Services: Please consider submitting your best work to the following venues.

• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing

• PC Member (Security, Privacy and Compliance): IEEE Cloud 2019

• Track co-chair (Security, Privacy and Trust): TheWebConf 2019 (formerly WWW 2019)

• Guest Editor, IEEE Internet Computing Special Issue on Healthcare Informatics and Privacy

• PC member: IEEE Cloud'18, IEEE Cloud'17, IEEE EDGE'17 

  • [past conferences: CIKM'16, CLOUD'16, ICDCS'14, CODASPY'14, ...]

Recent Selected Publications (full list: DBLP)

Machine Learning, AI, Security

• [NLP, Fairness - Under preparation] Bias Mitigation in Text using Bias Graphs. Kundu, Natarajan, Payne, Rademaker, Sahayaraj.

• Uncheatable Machine Learning Inference. Canim, Kundu, Payne, CoRR abs/1908.03270 (2019)

• Deep Learning Techniques for Fraud Detection in Decentralized Identity Graphs. Payne, Kundu, Singh, Natarajan, 2020.

• [AI Ethics, Blockchain] Data Transparency with Blockchain and AI Ethics. Bertino, Kundu, Sura, ACM J. Data Inf. Qual. 11(4) (2019)

• [NLP, Attack graphs] Attack Circuits for IoT Network, Payne, Budhraja, Kundu, Usenix HotSec, 2019 (Lightning talk)

• How Secure Is Your IoT Network? IEEE ICIOT 2019

• Towards Deep Federated Defenses Against Malware in Cloud Ecosystems. Payne, Kundu, IEEE TPS-ISA 2019

Updates

2019

• IBM Patent Achievement [July/August 2019] (Award)

• Stackvault: Protection from untrusted functions

• 102nd patent granted [July 2019]

• PrivIdEx: Privacy Preserving and Secure Exchange of Digital Identity Assets (based on Blockchain  -- Hyperledger, ZKP,  ZK-Snark) presented at TheWebConf19.

• 100th patent granted. [May 2019]

• AI Security Panel at CERIAS Symposium 2019.

• "How secure is your IoT network" accepted and to be presented at IEEE ICIOT'19.

• 80th patent granted: "Device Security Via Swipe Patterns" USPTO 10,185,817

• Paper Accepted TheWebConf19 (aka WWW'19): "PrivIdEx: Privacy Preserving and Secure Exchange of Digital Identity Assets"

• 79th patent granted: "Anonymization of traffic patterns over communication networks". USPTO #US9866532B2

2018

• "Blockchain Chip" a proposal in "Collaborative and Accountable Hardware Governance using Blockchain".

• Guest Editorial IEEE Internet Computing Mar/Apr 2018: 

  • "Healthcare Informatics and Privacy"

• Accepted at ICDCS'18 

  • "A Trusted Health Care Data Analytics Cloud Platform"

• Accepted at EDBT'18 

  • "Research Directions in Blockchain Data Management and Analytics"

• Accepted at IEEE ICDE 

  • "Efficient and Scalable Integrity Verification of Data and Query Results for Graph Databases"

2017

• Named as Research Master Inventor (for second time) for Class of 2018 (Nov '17) (First named as Master Inventor in Nov'14).

• Named as ACM Distinguished Member (Nov '17)

• Accepted at IEEE TKDE (Nov '17) 

  • “Efficient and Scalable Integrity Verification of Data and Query Results for Graph Databases”

• Named as ACM Distinguished Speaker (April '17)

• Accepted at IEEE Cloud'17 

  • "Risk-Based Packet Routing for Privacy and Compliance-Preserving SDN"

  • "Compliance-Aware Provisioning of Containers on Cloud"

• Press coverage on the patent granted (Mar '17): 

  • Why IBM’s Patent for Self-Driving Vehicles Is Worth Considering

  • Self-driving smart wingman

  • IBM press release

Contributions and Impact:

Some of his primary contributions to the scientific community are the development of  leakage-free redactable signatures, discovery of security issues in programming languages, such as buffer overflows due to vulnerabilities in the “placement new” expression in C++, development of several cloud security and compliance techniques. During his research work, Ashish has established the areas of "privacy-preserving digital signatures, and data integrity techniques".

GCC released a patch based on the  paper on Placement new vulnerabilities in C++ [Kundu & Bertino, IEEE ICDCS'11]. 

Dr. Kundu's research work has directly and indirectly influenced several products and services. He is the security and compliance research lead for IBM Watson Health Cloud Platform. He has been the research lead for security and compliance for IBM Watson Genomics, and IBM Cognitive Learning for Education Cloud Platform. His prior work has also gone into IBM Hybrid Cloud offerings as well as to IBM Everyplace Access toolkit.