Speakers
Marina Blanton - Associate Professor, University at Buffalo
Marina Blanton is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. Her research interests lie in information security, privacy, and applied cryptography and span topics such as secure computation and outsourcing, integrity of outsourced computation and storage, private biometric and genomic computation, and other. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2007. She has 70 research publications and has received an AFOSR Young Investigator Award and ACM CCS Test of Time Award for her research contributions.
Varun Chandola - Assistant Professor, University at Buffalo
Varun Chandola is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at University at Buffalo (SUNY) in the Computer Science Department and the Center for Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering (CDSE). His research covers the application of data mining and machine learning to problems involving big and complex data, focusing on anomaly detection from big and complex data. Before joining UB, he was a scientist in the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He has a Phd in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Minnesota.
Holly Hubert - GlobalSecurityIQ
Holly L. Hubert, recently retired from the FBI with 25 years of experience in multiple disciplines and founded GlobalSecurityIQ, a Cybersecurity and Crisis Management company. As an FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge, she provided executive oversight of FBI Buffalo's Cyber Crime, Information Technology, Digital Forensics, Security/Business Continuity, Intelligence, Compliance, and Crisis Management Programs. After September 11th, Hubert founded and led the FBI Buffalo Cyber Task Force, a collaboration of federal, state, and local law enforcement partners highly trained in computer intrusions, financial crime, and cyberterrorism resulting in the mitigation of cyber-related national and international threats. Hubert secured federal funding and established the Western New York Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory (RCFL), one of only 15 FBI Laboratory Division-affiliated state-of-the-art facilities dedicated to the science of digital forensics. She received numerous career commendations and was twice the recipient of the “Director’s Award,” the FBI’s highest accolade, to include recognition for “Outstanding Cyber Investigation.” Throughout her career, Hubert extensively lectured nationally and internationally on Cyber Crime and Leadership. She was a member of the FBI Training Division's adjunct faculty on the topics of Leadership, Cyber Crime, and Intelligence. Hubert holds an undergraduate degree in Information Systems Management, a master's in Communication & Leadership, and ISACA CISM, CGEIT, and CRISC certifications.
Ramanand Kambli - Regional Director, India and SAARC Region, Crowdstrike
Ramanand Kambli recently joined CrowdStrike as the Regional Director for India & SAARC Region. Ram has been with the IT Industry for 18 years of which the last decade has been in Information Security. He was recently the Channel Director for Blue Coat (acquired by Symantec) before moving to CrowdStrike. Prior to Blue Coat, Ram was with McAfee in various Sales roles for almost 5 years. Having worked on security architectures of large organizations in India he understands the challenges that Indian organizations face and pursues InfoSec as a passion. Ram, holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Science and Master’s Degree in Management Studies from the University of Mumbai.
Amol Kulkarni - Senior VP (Engineering), Crowdstrike
Amol Kulkarni is a seasoned engineering executive with extensive experience building large-scale big data enterprise cloud platforms, consumer cloud services and enterprise products while knitting together world class, high performing global engineering teams. Amol is currently the Sr. Vice President Engineering for CrowdStrike overseeing the company’s engineering organization and customer facing technology infrastructure. Prior to joining CrowdStrike, Amol held numerous senior positions at Microsoft. Most recently, he was responsible for the knowledge platform in Bing driving significant gains for Bing’s US search market share. Amol also held senior roles in Windows Azure and BizTalk Server, helping reduce COGs and improve developer productivity. Earlier in his career, Amol held engineering research positions at General Motors and Indian electronic company Nelco. Amol holds numerous U.S. patents for engineering and technology in the areas of distributed systems, application hosting/containers and model-based applications. Amol is currently on the advisory board of MindChipps, an IT consulting and services startup. Amol holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, a Masters of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and a Bachelor of Engineering from College of Engineering, Pune, India.
Satyajit Nath – Senior Engineering Manager, Crowdstrike
Satyajit Nath is an industry veteran of cybersecurity product development. He serves as Senior Engineering Manager for the Linux and Mac sensor work for the CrowdStrike Falcon product. Earlier, he worked at Isilon (part of Dell EMC) where he managed security engineering for that scale-out NAS product. Prior to that, he worked in Microsoft (core access control model in the Windows kernel), Pervasive Security Systems (enterprise DRM), and Valicert (led engineering for 2 PKI-based products - digital receipts and financial transaction routing). Satyajit has a Bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from IIT Kharagpur, and an MSCS from the University at Buffalo.
Utkarsh Porwal - Applied Researcher, eBay
Utkarsh works as an applied researcher in the search technology group of eBay in San Jose, CA. He works on relevance, ranking, recommendation and automatic query rewrites. Before joining search, he was part of the trust science group where he was working on detecting abusive buyers and feature selection. His research interest lies broadly in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing and pattern recognition. He has a PhD in applied machine learning from SUNY, Buffalo.
Prakash Samaga - Director, AML Operations, KeyBank
Prakash Samaga is a Director – AML Operations at KeyBank, heading the AML operations department for the bank. Prior to this role, Prakash was the Chief BSA/AML Officer at First Niagara Bank, where he was responsible for developing and governing all aspects of Bank Secrecy Act/AML Compliance, Fraud Risk and Financial Crime programs including policies, procedures and all other applicable statutes and regulations. Prior to joining First Niagara, Prakash worked at Ernst & Young, where he was a key member of EY’s Risk Advisory Services practice. He led several strategic client engagements on Risk/Compliance technology advisory, regulatory reporting and internal audit for large global banks and broker dealers. Prior to EY, Prakash was with Oracle Financial Services Software Inc., in a number of large program management related roles and led teams across US, Europe and Asia. Prakash holds an MBA in Finance and a Masters in Computer Applications. He is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS), Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) and Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP). Prakash is a member of Gartner Research Circle.
Phil Schneider - President and CTO, La Salle Concepts
Philip Schneider, Co-founder, President, and Chief Technology Officer of La Salle Concepts, is currently pursuing his PhD in electrical engineering at the University at Buffalo. As a member of the University’s Sensor and Micro-actuators Learning Lab, Phil’s current research includes the development of new healthcare-related wearable technologies for point of care applications, the use of biometric technologies in the mobile consumer market, biometric Liveness detection schemes, and the creation of state-of-the-art test phantoms for medical sensor testing and validation. Phil has a true passion for bringing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) to the local community. He is the founder of Project FIS, an ongoing effort to inspire and motivate underrepresented students in the field of STEM through hands on, high energy, interactive science experiments. He is a Western New York Prosperity Fellows working to directly contribute to the economic resurgence and prosperity in the Western New York region.
Dr. Catherine J. Ullman - Senior Information Security Analyst, University at Buffalo
Dr. Catherine J. Ullman began her IT career nearly 20 years ago as a Technical Support Specialist. After gaining valuable experience, as well as several technical certifications while working for Ingram Micro and subsequently Amherst Systems, she was offered and accepted a position at UB as a Systems Administrator in 2000 in which she provided both server and workstation support for several departments within Undergraduate Education. While she enjoyed her support role, she began to specialize in computer security and computer forensics. As a result, Cathy was often utilized by the Information Security Office to assist in the investigation of security breaches. Ultimately, she was asked to join the Information Security Office full time in 2009. In her current role as a Senior Information Security Analyst, Cathy is responsible for performing computer forensic investigative services for compliance on potentially compromised machines as well as personnel issues. She also assists with incident management involving intrusion detection and analysis and provides security awareness training to departments on campus upon request.
John Walp - Vice President, Cyber Services, DIGITS LLC
John Walp has more than 20 years of Information Technology experience, more than half of which has been focused on information security challenges. John is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) as well as a Certified Information Security Manager (CISM). He is a graduate of the FBI Citizens Academy and serves as the Executive Vice President of the FBI's Buffalo InfraGard Membership Alliance. Mr. Walp serves on the advisory board for the National Security Agency-sponsored Center of Excellence in Information Systems Assurance Research and Education (CEISARE) at the University of Buffalo as well as the Business Advisory Board of Medaille College. He is a member of the High-Tech Crime Consortium and the U.S. Secret Services Electronic Crimes Task Force. Prior to joining M&T Bank, John has held a variety of technology positions in different industry verticals including Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Moog Inc. A veteran of the United State Air Force, he served his country for 22 years which included both active and reserve serviceHe holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems from State University of New York College at Buffalo.
