Waseem Ahmad (Home) 847-332-4359 (Cell) 312-342-9861 http://www2.uic.edu/~wahmad1 1915 Maple Ave. Apt 822 Evanston, Illinois 60201 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BIOSKETCH Waseem is pursuing his PhD in Computer Engineering at University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC). His research interests are Applied Machine Learning, Applied Cryptography, Privacy Preserving Data Mining and Security in Multimedia Systems. He joined UIC in spring 2003. Prior to joining UIC, he was an Assistant Research Engineer at Satellite Research and Development Center-Lahore, Pakistan. He completed his Bachelors in Computer Engineering with Honors from University of Engineering and Technology Lahore. Waseem has seven peer-reviewed and invited publications. He also worked as Summer Intern at Sun Microsystems, Sun Research Labs and Motorola Labs in summers of ’04,’05,’06 respectively. Waseem is a Student Member of the IEEE, the ACM, and is also a member of IEEE-CS and IEEE-COMSOC. He has served as a member of Program Committee of IEEE ICC 2007. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RESEARCH INTERESTS • Applied Machine Learning (Data/Graph Mining), Applied Cryptography (Threshold Homomorphic Cryptosystems, Incremental Hashes), Privacy Preserving Data Mining and Secure Multimedia Systems. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- EDUCATION University of Illinois at Chicago January 2003-Present Doctorate of Philosophy in Computer Engineering • Thesis Title, “TRIUMF: A context-aware trusted Middleware for Secure and Reliable Collaborative Computing”. • GPA: 3.91 overall, 4.00 in Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan April 1998-April 2002 Bachelor of Science (with Honors) in Electrical and Computer Engineering • Senior Year thesis title:“UNAHA: Unified Navigation Architecture for Hypertext Applications”. • GPA: 81/100 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PUBLICATIONS (PDF versions available at (http://www2.uic.edu/~wahmad1/papers/) • Waseem Ahmad, Ashfaq Khokhar,“Phoenix: Privacy Preserving Biclustering on Horizontally Partitioned Data ”, Accepted for ACM SIGKDD International Workshop of Privacy, Security and Trust in KDD, San Jose, 2007( To be held in Conjuction with ACM SIGKDD Conference). • Waseem Ahmad, Ashfaq Khokhar,“SAMcast - A Secure and Authenticated Multicast Protocol for Multimedia Content Distribution in Large Scale P2P Networks ”, In proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Glasgow, UK June 2007. • Waseem Ahmad, Ashfaq Khokhar,“Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering on Web Portals”, Accepted for The Third International Symposium on Information Assurance and Security (IAS), Manchester, UK, August 2007. • Waseem Ahmad, Ashfaq Khokhar,“Secure Aggregation in Large Scale Overlay Networks”, In proceedings of IEEE Globecomm, San Francisco, CA., November 2006. • Waseem Ahmad,“Efficient Memory Integrity Verification Schemes for Secure Processor”, Accepted for 3rd IEEE International Conference on Information Technology Applications, December 2004, Sydney Australia. • Waseem Ahmad, Khawar Sajjad, “Unified Navigation Architecture for Hypertext Applications (UNAHA): A Replacement for Traditional Web Browsers. Navigation Facilities”. Proceedings of IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet (ICWI), Algarve, Portugal. November 2003. • Waseem Ahmad, Ashfaq Khokhar. “Towards Secure and Privacy Preserving Data Mining over Computational Grid”. Proceedings of NSF InternationalWorkshop on Frontiers of Information Technology Islamabad, Pakistan December 2003 (Invited). • Waseem Ahmad, Ashfaq Khokhar,“TRIUMF: A Trusted Middleware for Fault-tolerant Secure Collaborative Computing”(Invited), In Proceedings of Third NSF International Workshop on Frontiers of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan, December 2005. • Waseem Ahmad, Ashfaq Khokhar, “cHawk: A Highly Efficient Biclustering algorithm based on Bipartite Graph Crossing Minimization“, (Under Review). • Waseem Ahmad, Ashfaq Khokhar,“Scalable Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering on Large Scale Overlay Networks“, (Under Review) . --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- EXPERIENCE Motorola Research Labs, Schaumburg, IL. Project SeESAW/Liquid Music Pervasive Platforms and Architectures Lab May 2006- August 2006 Graduate Summer Intern • Architected and developed ContextOracle, a system for automated context inference and reasoning in pervasive computing environments. The system enables context-aware collaborative environments by providing contextual clues in a trusted and secure manner. • As part of ContextOracle, developed and Implemented a novel space and time efficient Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) based machine learning algorithm to predict context transitions. • Implemented ContextOracle (in Qt/C++) using Motorola’s EzX SDK on E680 and A1200 Linux based mobile phone platforms. The applications of ContextOracle include Context-Aware communication agent and a music recommendation engine. Sun Microsystems Research Labs, Burlington, MA. Project Venice May 2005- August 2005 Graduate Summer Intern • Architected and developed a framework for privacy preserving intra-organization collaborations. The framework employs novel machine learning algorithms to learn user preferences in context of their information sharing decisions. • Developed and Implemented (in Java) a novel Inductive Inference System based on an ensemble of Bayesian Classifiers. University of Illinois at Chicago Multimedia Systems Laboratory January 2003- Present Graduate Research Assistant • Laid out the design for TRIUMF, a middleware for secure and reliable privacy preserving collaborations. • Developed an efficient threshold additively homomorphic cryptosystem (modified version of Damgard/Jurik cryptosystem) with strong security guarantees for large scale secure multiparty computations. • Developed a reliable communication library to support highly scalable, fault-tolerant secure multiparty computation algorithms. • Developed a novel distributed biclustering solution based on bigraph crossing minimization problem. University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering August 2004- Present Graduate Teaching Assistant • Graded and assisted students in ECE 465, Digital Logic Design and ECE 225, Electric Circuit Analysis. • Conducted Labs, performed grading duties and prepared course materials, including homeworks, supplementary handouts, and a Quartus II tutorial, for ECE 465 students. Sun Microsystems Inc. San Diego, CA System Dynamic Characterization and Control Group (SDCC) June 2004 - August 2004 Graduate Summer Intern • Conducted research to set up a Grid based High Performance Distributed Bioinformatics Platform, a project under Sun’s Life Sciences Initiative. • Set up and optimized a Grid environment based upon Sun Grid Engine (SGE) with MPI-Integration to run a typical Bioinformatics job. Satellite Research and Development Center Lahore, Pakistan April 2002-October 2002 Assistant Research Engineer • Secure Communication using Chaotic Modulation. • Simulation and Performance Evaluation of Software Radio in Matlab. • Gave and justified the idea to use a four node Beowulf cluster (Linux on Intel Xeon (Dual) Systems) instead of Compaq/HP ES40 Alpha Server for High Performance Technical Computing Requirements which resulted in at least four times improvement in cost/performance ratio. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TALKS/PRESENTATIONS • "ContextOracle : A Context Reasoning System for Resource Constrained Devices", Motorola Labs, Schaumberg, IL, August 2006. • “A framework for Privacy Preserving Distributed Collaboration”, Sun Microsystems Research Labs, Burlington, MA, August 2005. • “Secure Multiparty Computation Applications over Large Scale Distributed Systems (Invited)”, Second NSF International Workshop on Frontiers of Information Technology Islamabad, Pakistan December 2004. • “Towards Grid Based High Performance Distributed Bioinformatics Platform”, Presentation given to System Dynamics, Characterization and Control (SDCC) Group at Sun Microsystems, San Diego, CA, August 2004. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HONORS • Held Merit/Talent Scholarship throughout my college and university life. • Member of the national honor society Phi Kappa Phi. • ECE Department Representative for Graduate Student Council. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RELEVANT COURSE WORK AND PROJECTS Details :(http://www2.uic.edu/~wahmad1/acads.html). • ECE594: Probabilistic Robotics : Developed an efficient technique for estimation of Gaussian Mixture Models over streaming data on Resource Constrained Devices. • ECE569 High Performance Systems and Processors: Developed a novel scheme for memory integrity verification in secure multiprocessor environments. This scheme employed a variant of efficient MAC based authentication of Inter-processor traffic and a MAC Tree (Merkle Tree) based scheme for authenticating Processor-Memory Traffic. • MCS594 High Speed Cryptography: Looked into High Performance Implementation of Different Symmetric and Asymmetric Cryptography Algorithms (AES, RSA, El Gamal and their Elliptic Curve variants) over different architectures (X86, PowerPC, Sparc); In the meanwhile efficient hardware implementation of Poly1305AES (A fast message authentication coding scheme) was also devised. • CS580 Data Mining And Text Mining: Developed Laplace Corrected Naive Bayesian Classifier and K-means clustering algorithm. • ECE594 Advanced Microprocessor Architecture: In self-proposed term project ”Graph based Memory Integrity Verification schemes for Secure Processors”, developed a novel high performance memory integration verification scheme. This graph based scheme (an extension of Merkle trees) makes effective use of locality in memory access patterns in order to provide efficient software tamper resistance for secure processors, namely XOM and its derivation Aegis. • ECE566 Parallel Processing: Implemented a Scalable High Performance Classifier for data mining (ScalParC by Vipin Kumar et al.) on 14 Processor HP V-Server using MPI/C. The project also involved development of a distributed hash table. • ECE466Advanced Computer Architecture: Performed SimpleScalar simulations for Quantitative/ Qualitative Study based Optimal Parameter Selection of a Superscalar Processor. • ECE434 Multimedia Communication Networks: Implemented MPEG-2 Codec and its network simulation on ATM adaptation layers AAL1 and AAL5 (both in Matlab). • CS450 Computer Networks: Conducted research on Performance Monitoring and Evaluation of a Concurrent File Server. • Senior Year Project: Unified Navigation Architecture for Hypertext Applications (UNAHA). UNAHA allows for visual navigation through the browser session history. It employs a novel graph based data structure to help user keep context of his browsing sessions. It was developed as a toolbar to Mozilla 0.9.2 and can be downloaded from (http://www2.uic.edu/~wahmad1/unaha/ index.html). --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MEMBERSHIP OF TECHNICAL SOCIETIES • Student Member of IEEE( IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Communications Society), ACMand SIAM. • Member of IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SKILLS • Programming in languages including C++, Java. Java: – 7 years experience. – Wrote "MusicFinder": a music recommendation engine. MusicFinder captures user actions on a UPnP renderer and serve recommendations for relevant songs by integrating content from several internet sites. – Developed an online inference induction/decision making system at Sun Labs. – Developed advanced threshold homomorphic cryptographic protocols for TRIUMF project at UIC. – Wrote a scalable, secure and reliable communication library for large scale overlay networks using JXTA technology. – Wrote a Database driven online testing system for a computer college using JDBC/ODBC connections. C++ and C: – 5 years experience. – Developed cHawk: A highly efficient Biclustering solution. cHawk was integrated with BiCAT and is available uder GPL at http://www2.uic.edu/~wahmad1/software/cHawk/. – Wrote ContextOracle at Motorola Labs for context-aware applications on linux based cell phones. – Wrote a scalable parallel high performance classifier for Data Mining. – Wrote a multi-threaded file server which can handle multiple concurrent connections. – Wrote a number of parallel port interfacing programs for computer based automation and control. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- REFERENCES • Ashfaq Khokhar (Advisor), Professor CS and ECE Departments, UIC. • Seth Proctor, Member of Research Staff, Sun Labs, Burlington, MA • Nitya Narasimhan, Member of Research Staff, Motorola Labs, Schaumburg, IL • Keith Whisnant, Member of Technical Staff, SDCC Sun Microsystems.