Sagar Samtani

Assistant Professor
Weimer Faculty Fellow
Director, Kelley’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (DSAIL)

Department: Operations & Decision Technologies

Campus: Bloomington

Areas of Expertise

Artificial intelligence for cybersecurity, cyber threat intelligence, deep learning, smart vulnerability assessment, Internet of Things, Dark Web analytics, cybersecurity, mobile health analytics, mental health analytics

Academic Degrees

PhD, University of Arizona, 2018
MSMIS, University of Arizona, 2014
BSBA, University of Arizona, 2013

Professional Experience

Associate Editor, ACM Digital Threats: Research and Practice (2022 - Present)
Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (2021 - Present)
Indiana University, 2020-present
University of South Florida, 2018 – 2020
National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarship-for-Service (SFS) Fellowship. 2014 – 2017
Research Associate, Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Arizona. 2014-2018

Awards, Honors & Certificates

National Science Foundation Grant: “CyberCorps SFS: Preparing the Next Generation of Cybersecurity Professionals,” $2.3M, 2020-2025 (added as Co-PI in 2022)
National Science Foundation Grant: “Cultivating the Next-Generation of “Cyber AI” Professionals: Reviewing the Present to Provide Recommendations for the Future,” $242K, 2021-2025
National Science Foundation Grant: “SaTC EAGER: AI for Cybersecurity (AI4Cyber) Research Education at Scale,” $300K (IU Share: 100K), 2020 – 2022.
National Science Foundation Grant: “CICI: SSC: Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence and Comprehensive Network Monitoring for Scientific Cyberinfrastructure: The AZSecure Framework,” $1M (IU Share: $120K), 2019 – 2022.
National Science Foundation Grant: “CRII: SaTC: Identifying Emerging Threats in the Online Hacker Community for Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence: A Diachronic Graph Convolutional Autoencoder Framework,” $175K, 2019 – 2021.
Winner, IU Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (the most prestigious award at IU for untenured faculty). 2023.
Winner, IEEE Big Data Security Junior Research Award (for outstanding contributions to Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Threat Intelligence). 2023.
Winner, Indiana University Kelley School of Business Early Career Research Impact Award. 2023.
Winner, IU Trustees Teaching Award. 2023.
Winner, Conference on Health Information Technology and Analytics (CHITA) Best Student Paper Award. 2023.
Winner, AIS Early Career Award. 2022.
Winner, Kelley School of Business Research Award. 2022.
AIS Distinguished Member. 2022.
Elected to the Top 50 Undergraduate Professors of 2022, Poets and Quants. 2022.
Inductee, NSF/CISA CyberCorps Scholarship-for-Service (SFS) Hall of Fame. 2022.
Winner, Best Associate Editor. Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS). 2022.
Best Student Paper Nominee, INFORMS Workshop on Data Science. 2022.
Nominee, Kelley Doctoral Student Association (DSA) for Faculty Exceptional Inspiration and Guidance Award. 2022, 2023.
Winner, IU Faculty Academy on Excellence on Teaching (FACET) Mumford Excellence in Extraordinary Teaching Award. 2021.
Nominee, Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award. 2021, 2022.
Winner, Best Paper Award. IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI). 2020.
Grant Thornton Scholar, Indiana University. 2020 – 2023.
ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award. 2019.
NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award. 2019.
Runner-up, Best Paper Award. IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI). 2017, 2018.
Runner-up, INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award. 2018.
Paul S. and Shirley Goodman Award in International Computer Technology. 2017.
National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarship-for-Service (SFS) Fellowship. 2014 – 2017.
James F. LaSalle Award for Teaching Excellence. University of Arizona. 2016.

Selected Publications

Samtani, S., Zhu, H., Padmanabhan, B., Chai, Y., Chen, H., and Nunamaker, Jr., J. F. (2023). Deep Learning for Information Systems Research. Journal of Management Information Systems, 40(1), 271-301.
Samtani, S., Zhao, Z., and Krishnan, R. (2023). Secure Knowledge Management and Cybersecurity in the Era of Artificial Intelligence. Information Systems Frontiers (ISF), 25, 425-429.
Ampel, B., Samtani, S., Zhu, H., and Chen, H. (Forthcoming). Creating Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence with Hacker Exploit Labels: A Deep Transfer Learning Approach. MIS Quarterly
Yu, S., Chai, Y., Samtani, S., Liu, H., and Chen, H. (2023). Motion Sensor-Based Fall Prevention for Senior Care: A Hidden Markov Model with Generative Adversarial Network Approach. Information Systems Research, in press.
Chai, Y., Liang, R., Samtani, S., Zhu, H., Wang, M., Liu, Y., and Jiang, Y. (2023). Additive Feature Attribution Explainable Methods to Craft Adversarial Attacks for Text Classification and Text Regression. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, in press.
Samtani, S., Chai, Y., and Chen, H. 2022. Linking exploits from the dark web to known vulnerabilities for proactive cyber threat intelligence: An attention-based deep structured semantic model. MIS Quarterly, 46(2), 911–946.
Samtani, S., Chen, H., Kantarcioglu, M., and Thuraisingham, B. (2022). Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Threat Intelligence (XAI-CTI). IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 19(4), 2149-2150.
Ebrahimi, M., Chai, Y., Samtani, S., and Chen, H. (2022). Cross-Lingual Security Analytics: Cyber Threat Detection in the International Dark Web with Adversarial Deep Representation Learning. MIS Quarterly, 46(2), 1209-1226.
Samtani, S., Kantarcioglu, M., and Chen, H. (2021). A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective for Conducting Artificial Intelligence-enabled Privacy Analytics: Connecting Data, Algorithms, and Systems. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, 12(1), 1-18.
Samtani, S., Zhu, H., and Chen, H. (2020). Proactively Identifying Emerging Hacker Threats on the Dark Web: A Diachronic Graph Embedding Framework (D-GEF). ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, 23(4), 1–33.
Zhu, H., Samtani, S., Brown, R., and Chen, H. A (2020). A Deep Learning Approach for Recognizing Activity of Daily Living (ADL) for Senior Care: Exploiting Interaction Dependency and Temporal Patterns. MIS Quarterly, 45(2), 859-896.
Liang, Y., Samtani, S., Guo, B., and Yu, Z. (2020). Behavioral Biometrics for Continuous Authentication in the Internet of Things Era: An Artificial Intelligence Perspective. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 7(9), 9128-9143.
Zhu, H., Samtani, S., Chen, H., and Nunamaker, J. F. (2020). Human Identification for Activities of Daily Living: A Deep Transfer Learning Approach. Journal of Management Information Systems, 37(2), 457-483.
Pour, M., Mangino, A., Friday, K., Rathbun, M., Bou-Harb, E., Iqbal, F., Samtani, S., Crichigno, J., and Ghani, N. (2020). Into Data-driven Curation, Learning and Analysis for Inferring Evolving IoT Botnets in the Wild. Computers and Security, 91(101707).
Samtani, S., Yu, S., and Zhu, H. (2019). Fear Appeals and Information Security Behaviors: An Empirical Study on Mechanical Turk. AIS Transactions on Replication Research, 5(5), 1-22.
Samtani, S., Yu, S., Zhu, H., Patton, M., Matherly, J., and Chen, H. (2018). Identifying SCADA Systems and their Vulnerabilities on the Internet of Things: A Text Mining Approach. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 33(3), 63-73.
Samtani, S., Chinn, R., Chen, H., and Nunamaker, J. F. (2017). Exploring Emerging Hacker Assets and Key Hackers for Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence. Journal of Management Information Systems, 34(3), 1023-1053.

Edited on August 10, 2023