Speakers
Prof. Dennis Akos (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
Dennis Akos earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Ohio University’s Avionics Engineering Center. He developed the first software-defined radio for GPS/GNSS and co-founded NordNav Technologies, later acquired by CSR/Qualcomm, where his work helped advance GPS/GNSS receivers for mobile devices. He has held academic positions at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden and at Stanford University. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation (ION). His research focuses on GPS/GNSS, software-defined radio (SDR), digital signal processing, and radio-frequency (RF) system design. Since 2005, he has been a faculty member in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he continues to contribute to research and education while maintaining a visiting appointment at Stanford University.
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Prof. John Baras (University of Maryland, USA)
John S. Baras is a Distinguished University Professor, holding the Lockheed Martin Chair in Systems Engineering, in the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) and the ECE Department at the University of Maryland College Park (UMD). He received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, in 1973, and he has been with UMD since then. From 1985 to 1991, he was the Founding Director of the ISR. Since 1992, he has been the Director of the Maryland Center for Hybrid Networks (HYNET), which he co-founded. He is a Fellow of IEEE (Life), SIAM, AAAS, NAI, IFAC, AMS, AIAA, Member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA). Major honors and awards include the 1980 George Axelby Award from the IEEE Control Systems Society, the 2006 Leonard Abraham Prize from the IEEE Communications Society, the 2017 IEEE Simon Ramo Medal, the 2017 AACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, and the 2018 AIAA Aerospace Communications Award. In 2016 he was inducted in the University of Maryland A. J. Clark School of Engineering Innovation Hall of Fame. In June 2018 he was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa by his alma mater the National Technical University of Athens. His research interests include systems, control, optimization, autonomy, machine learning, artificial intelligence, communication networks, applied mathematics, signal processing and understanding, robotics, computing architectures, formal methods, network security and trust, systems biology, healthcare management, model-based systems engineering, risk sensitive decision making and robustness. He has educated 105 PhD and 170 MS students and mentored 70 postdoctoral fellows, who have gone to excellent careers in industry, academia, government. He has been awarded twenty patents and honored with many awards as innovator and leader of economic development.
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Prof. Elisa Bertino (Purdue University, USA)
Elisa Bertino is a Samuel D. Conte Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. She has worked for more than 40 years in data security and privacy. Her research interests include machine learning techniques for cybersecurity, security of cellular networks, zero-trust architectures, and agentic AI security. In the area of machine learning for cybersecurity, she led the design of transfer learning techniques for network attack detections and for detection and classification of malware. In the area of cellular network security, she led the design of the LTEInspector and 5Greasoner frameworks to test security properties of cellular networks leading to the identification of ten novel vulnerabilities in the 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) and 5G standards, and the discovery of new privacy attacks in 4G and 5G cellular protocols. For this work, she was named to the GSMA (Global System for Mobile Communications Association) Mobile Security Research Hall of Fame. More recently she has been working on machine learning techniques for detecting malicious base stations and attacks to synchronization protocols for O-RAN. She is a Fellow member of IEEE, ACM, and AAAS. She received the 2002 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award, the 2019-2020 ACM Athena Lecturer Award, and the 2021 IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award. She is currently serving as ACM Vice President.
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Prof. Jean Camp (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA)
L. Jean Camp is the Bank of America Distinguished Professor at UNC- Charlotte. Previously, she was a Professor in the School of Informatics and Computer Science at Indiana University. She was selected as a member of the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence in 2024. Camp was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2017, an IEEE Fellow in the 2018 class of fellows, and a 2021 ACM Fellow for contributions to computer security. She joined Indiana after eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School where her courses were also listed in Harvard Law, Harvard Business, and the Engineering Systems Division of MIT. She spent the year after earning her doctorate from Carnegie Mellon as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She began her career as an engineer at Catawba Nuclear Station with a MSEE from UNC-Charlotte. Camp was inducted into The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi in 2026.
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Prof. Alexandra Dmitrienko (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
Alexandra Dmitrienko is a Full Professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, where she holds the Chair of Trustworthy Systems at the Faculty of Computer Science, Department of Software Engineering. She has over 17 years of experience in academia and research, having worked at leading institutions including Ruhr University Bochum, the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, ETH Zurich, and the University of Würzburg. She received her PhD in Security and Information Technology from TU Darmstadt (defended with distinction). Her work has been recognized with the ERCIM STM WG Award and an Intel Doctoral Student Honor Award. Her research focuses on software security, IoT security, and the intersection of AI and security, including the use of AI for security and the security of AI systems.
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Prof. Amir Herzberg (University of Connecticut, USA)
Dr. Herzberg's is the Comcast professor for Cybersecurity Innovation in the school of computing of the University of Connecticut. His research areas include internet security, applied cryptography, privacy and anonymity, human-centered security, security for cyber-physical systems, and social, economic and legal aspects of security.
Dr. Herzberg earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991 from the Technion in Israel. He then worked in IBM research, in the T.J. Watson research center and then in the Haifa research lab, until 2000. From 2002 to 2017, he was a professor in Bar Ilan University (Israel). Since 2017, he is professor at University of Connecticut.
Dr. Herzberg is the author of numerous papers and patents in different areas of cybersecurity, as well as the textbook 'Applied Introduction to Cybersecurity and Cryptography'.
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Dr. Beatrice Motella (European Commission, Joint Research Center, Italy)
Beatrice Motella is a Project Officer in the Space, Connectivity and Economic Security Unit at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. She earned a Ph D in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Politecnico di Torino. Her work spans various aspects of radio navigation, with a particular emphasis on Galileo signal authentication and advanced signal‑processing techniques.
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Prof. Catuscia Palamidessi (INRIA Saclay and LIX, France)
Catuscia Palamidessi is Director of Research at Inria Saclay (since 2002), where she leads the team COMETE. She has been Full Professor at the University of Genova, Italy (1994-1997) and at Penn State University, USA (1998-2002). Palamidessi's research interests include Privacy, Machine Learning, Fairness, Secure Information Flow, Formal Methods, and Concurrency. Her past achievements include the proof of expressiveness gaps between various concurrent calculi, and the development of a probabilistic version of the asynchronous pi-calculus. More recently, she has contributed to establish the foundations of probabilistic secure information flow, she has proposed an extension of differential privacy, and geo-indistinguishability, an approach to location privacy. In 2019 she has obtained an ERC advanced grant to conduct research on Privacy and Machine Learning. In 2022, she received the Grand Prix of the French Academy of Science. She is coauthor of more than 250 scientific publications, and she has been PC chair of various conferences including Logics in Computer Science and Computer Communication Security (track on Anonymity and Privacy), and PC member of more than 130 international conferences. She is/has been in the Editorial Board of several journals, including the IEEE Transactions in Dependable and Secure Computing, the ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, the Journal of Computer Security, Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, the Journal of Logic and Algebraic Methods in Programming, and Acta Informatica. She is chair of the Executive Committee of ACM SIGLOG (Special Interest Group on Logic and Computation), and member of the Executive Committees of CONCUR, and CSL (Computer Science Logic). She is/has been member of the scientific advising committee of the ANSII (the French National Cybersecurity Agency), the advisory boards of CISPA (the Helmholtz Center for Information Security), GSSI (the Gran Sasso Science Institute) and IMDEA (the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Software Development Technologies). In 2021, she has been member of the CORE committee for the classification of conferences in the areas of security and privacy.
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Prof. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi is a Professor of Computer Science and head of the System Security Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He led the university’s Cybersecurity Center from 2020 to 2023 and has directed multiple Intel Collaborative Research Labs since 2012.
He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saarland, Germany, as well as degrees in Industrial and Electrical Engineering. Before joining academia, he worked in R&D at leading IT companies, including Ericsson Telecommunications. His research spans security, privacy, and system design, with lasting impact across academia and industry.
Prof. Sadeghi served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine and on the editorial boards of ACM TODAES, ACM TIOT, and ACM DTRAP. He is a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and the ACM Europe Council.
His achievements have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, including the German Karl Heinz Beckurts Award for advancing Trusted Computing, the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award (2018), the Intel Academic Leadership Award (2021), the European Research Council Advanced Grant (2022), the DAC (Design Automation Conference) Service Award (2024), and the Synopsys Academic Award (2025).
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Prof. Gene Tsudik (UC Irvine, USA)
Gene Tsudik is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from USC in 1991. Before coming to UCI in 2000, he was at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory (1991-1996) and USC/ISI (1996-2000). His research interests include many topics in security, privacy and applied cryptography. Notably, these do not include Machine Learning, Differential Privacy as well as Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies. Gene Tsudik was a Fulbright Scholar (Italy) and a 3-time Fulbright Specialist (Singapore, Taiwan, and Myanmar). He is a fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and IFIP, as well as a foreign member of Academia Europaea. From 2009 to 2015 he served as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS, formerly known as TISSEC). He was the recipient of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contribution Award, the 2020 IFIP Jean-Claude Laprie Award. the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award, the 2024 NDSS Test-of-Time Award, and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. He also authored the first rhyming crypto-poem published as a refereed paper. Sadly, he has no social media presence.
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Prof. Serge Vaudenay (EPFL, Switzerland)
Serge Vaudenay is a Professor at EPFL, where he leads the Security and Cryptography Laboratory. He graduated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris with a major in mathematics and received his PhD in computer science from University of Paris 7 - Denis Diderot.
He works on cryptography and the security of digital information. Most of his recent works focus on formal security analysis of cryptographic algorithms and protocols, specifically in secure communication, post-quantum cryptography, digital identity, and on proving their security. He is a board member of GlobalID, a Swiss-based startup, where he helps developing applications based on biometry which are secure and privacy-preserving. He also works with CIMA Science, another startup, which develops solutions for economic inclusion based on smart contracts.
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Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Ingrid Verbauwhede is a full professor at the KU Leuven, in the COSIC research group. Her area of expertise is hardware security. It includes system and architecture design, embedded or cloud systems, ASIC and FPGA design and design methodologies. Ingrid is a fellow of IEEE and of IACR, and a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium for Sciences and Arts. She received two advanced ERC grants in 2016 and 2021 respectively. Her most recent awards are the 2023 the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Solid-State Circuits Award and the 2024 EDAA Achievement Award. In 2025, she received the FWO Excellence Prize. According to Google Scholar, Ingrid has an H-index of 97 with more than 34000 citations. Her list of publications and patents can be found at the following link: https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/people/ingrid-verbauwhede/ and on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZyG1ZGgAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao. Ingrid is also a co-founder of the start-up company Belfort Labs, which focuses on hardware for computing on encrypted data, and which is based on the results of her advanced ERC grants.
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Swedish National Hacking Team
The Swedish National Hacking Team (SNHT) represents Sweden at the European Cybersecurity Competition, a Capture The Flag competition between European countries. Each season, the team also qualifies for a number of international competitions and travel to finals all over the world. The team consists of 15 hackers from all over Sweden, between 16 and 25 years old. The members are selected through qualifier and a final held at Bosön, Stockholm each year. The team consists of experts on different fields within cybersecurity, such as forensics, web exploitation, cryptography and binary exploitation.
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