Sagar Samtani

Associate 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

Co-Founding Editor-in-Chief, ACM Transactions on Artificial Intelligence Security and Privacy (TAISAP), 2025-Present
Director of the Artificial Intelligence for Business Intelligence Research (AI4BIR) Center, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), 2024-2025
Associate Editor, MIS Quarterly, 2025-Present
Associate Editor, ACM Digital Threats: Research and Practice (2022 - Present)
Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (2021 - Present)
Associate Editor, Information and Management, 2022-2024
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: “EAGER: FDASS: Designing Accountable Behavioral Health Large Language Model Therapy Software” $300K. 2025-2027.
Corporate Grant from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC): Grant Title: “Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) Artificial Intelligence for Business Intelligence (AI4BI) Academic Program,” Funding Amount: $270K, 2024-2025.
National Science Foundation Grant: “CAREER: An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled Analytics Perspective for Developing Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence,” $604K, 2024 – 2029.
Year: 2023. Funding Source: NSF. Grant Title: “Breaking Down Silos and Building Bridges to Raise Awareness of Opportunities, Expand, and Diversity the Space-Cybersecurity Workforce,” $255K, 2023-2025.
Year: 2023. Funding Source: NSF. Grant Title: “CICI: UCSS: Enhancing the Usability of Vulnerability Assessment Results for Open-Source Software Technologies in Scientific Cyberinfrastructures: A Deep Learning Perspective,” Funding Amount: $600K (IU Share: $200K), 2023-2026.
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, Provost’s Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (mentor for Adhishree Kathikar). 2025.
Winner, NSF CAREER Award (first within the Kelley School of Business). 2024.
Winner, IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics Best Paper Award. 2023.
Winner, INFORMS ISS Gordon B. Davis Young Scholar Award. 2023.
Winner, INFORMS ISS Design Science Award. 2023.
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

Yoo, E., Craighead, C., and Samtani, S. (2025). Dependency network structure and security vulnerabilities in software supply chains. Journal of Management Information Systems, in press.
Ampel, B., Samtani, S., and Chen, H. (2025). Automated detection of phishing calls: An audio generation approach. MIS Quarterly, in press.
Yuan, A., Song, H., Garcia Colato, E., Pescosolido, B., and Samtani, S. (2025). Improving workplace well-being in modern organizations: A review of large language model-based mental health chatbots. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, 16(1), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3638424
Lin, F., Samtani, S., Zhu, H., Brandimarte, L., and Chen, H. (2024). Automated Analysis of Changes in Privacy Policies: A Structured Self-Attentive Sentence Embedding Approach. MIS Quarterly, 48(4), 1453-1482.
Ampel, B., Samtani, S., Zhu, H., and Chen, H. (2024). Creating Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence with Hacker Exploit Labels: A Deep Transfer Learning Approach. MIS Quarterly, 48(1), 137-166.
Ampel, B., Samtani, S., Zhu, H., Chen, H., and Nunamaker, J. F., Jr. (2024). Improving Threat Mitigation Through a Cybersecurity Risk Management Framework: A Computational Design Science Approach. Journal of Management Information Systems, 41(1), 236–265.
Ullman, S., Samtani, S., Zhu, H., Lazarine, B., and Chen, H. (2024). Enhancing Vulnerability Prioritization in Cloud Computing Using Multi-View Representation Learning. Journal of Management Information Systems, 41(3), 708-743.
Yu, S., Chai, Y., Samtani, S., Liu, H., and Chen, H. (2024). Motion Sensor-Based Fall Prevention for Senior Care: A Hidden Markov Model with Generative Adversarial Network Approach. Information Systems Research, 35(1), 1–15.
Manatova, D., DeVries, C., and Samtani, S. (2024). Understand your shady neighborhood: An approach for detecting and investigating hacker communities. Decision Support Systems, 184, 114271.
Hughes, J., Pastrana, S., Hutchings, A., Afroz, S., Samtani, S., Li, W., and Marin, E. (2024). SoK: The art of cybercrime community research. ACM Computing Surveys, 56(6), 1-26.
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.
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, 35(12), 12400-12414.
Liang, Y., Liu, L., Huangfu, L., Samtani, S., Yu, Z., and Zeng, D.. (2023). Learning Entangled Interactions of Complex Causality via Self-Paced Contrastive Learning. ACM Transactions on Knowledge and Data Discovery, 18(3), 56..
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 18, 2025