CCIS professor chairs three conferences this summer

This summer has been a busy one for CCIS’ Guevara Noubir. The professor, who has been at Northeastern since 2001, chaired two computer science conferences in June, with a third in Italy slated for September.

The first conference, an International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks, was hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Computer Society and took place in Boston from June 14-17. The second, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, was held in New York City from June 24-26. The last one will be held in Florence from Sept. 28-30. This will also be an IEEE conference, this time on Communications and Network Society.

“The first one is on wireless and mobile, the second is on wireless security, and the third one is on network security in general,” Noubir says. His work has led him to research in all these fields: mobile development, wireless security and network security.

Between research and teaching, Noubir has found time to chair conferences before these three as well. In 2012, he co-chaired the IEEE’s International Conference on Computer Communication Networks held in Munich. Last year, he co-chaired two conferences, including the IEEE’s Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking, held in Singapore.

Typically, Noubir serves as one of two Technical Program Committee chairs. He is responsible for the quality of the content of the conference: selecting the committee of researchers who will review submitted papers and deciding which papers make the cut – these conferences are competitive and tend to have an acceptance rate of about 20 percent, he says.

“Chairing the Technical Program Committee is viewed as a recognition of someone’s research work or achievements in the area because people trust that you can do the job and be fair,” Noubir says. “There’s one aspect about honesty, the other one is about competence – to be able to make the right decisions. Being invited to serve as the chair of three conferences in such a short time is a distinction.”

Looking forward to his work after the last conference winds down next month, Noubir says he’s ready to get back to research: “Teaching is important but I think the reason that we are in academia is because we enjoy doing research.”

Currently, his interests lie in privacy in mobile communication systems and cloud security. Phones can know a lot about their users based on data from apps, communication and computing infrastructures, and keeping that information private is a challenge. With clouds, the possibility of leaks – or of curious providers peeking at data uploaded to their service – poses security risks.

“Just imagine if you have one entity that has access to data about everyone in terms of how it could influence people,” Noubir says. “If you know everything about everyone, you can tell how they’d react to everything and you can influence society. It is not only about just one person. It is about the whole society.”