meet the team
Management
Researchers
Yuval Elovici is the director of the Telekom Innovation Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), head of BGU Cyber Security Research Center, Research Director of iTrust at SUTD, SUTD principle investigator of ST Electronics-SUTD Cyber Security Lab, a Professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at BGU, and the incumbent of the Davide and Irene Sala Chair in Homeland Security Research. He holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer and Electrical Engineering from BGU and a Ph.D. in Information Systems from Tel-Aviv University. Yuval has published articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and various peer-reviewed conferences. In addition, he has co-authored a book on social network security and a book on information leakage detection and prevention. His primary research interests are computer and network security, cyber security, web intelligence, information warfare, social network analysis, and machine learning. Yuval also consults professionally in the area of cyber security and is the co-founder of Morphisec, a startup company that develops innovative cyber security mechanisms that relate to moving target defense.
Dudu Mimran is the CTO of Telekom Innovation Laboratories Israel. He is a seasoned technical and business executive in the areas of big data, AI, IoT, cyber security, the cloud, fintech, and telecommunications, with expertise in innovation, business and technology strategy, enterprise digital transformation, and team building. He is the founder of multiple startup companies and the inventor of over 50 patents. In addition, he has developed dozens of innovative products, taking them from ideation to product delivery, written and spoken extensively on technology and other areas, and shares his expertise by serving as a mentor for startups and teaching at innovation centers.
Oleg serves as the R&D Director of Deutsche Telekom Innovation Labs Israel, focusing on future technologies in the fields of Cyber Security and Artificial Intelligence; as well as the R&D Director for Cyber@BGU – an umbrella organization responsible for all cyber security research and industrial collaborations at the Ben Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel (Israel’s Cyber Capital). Prior to joining DT Labs and Cyber@BGU, Oleg acted as an attorney, specializing in Hi-Tech, and represented a broad spectrum of local and international clients, including individual and institutional investors, VCs and long list of start-ups and Hi-Tech companies, among many others. In this capacity, Oleg still serves as a member of the Hi-Tech committee of the Israeli Bar Association. Before practicing law, Oleg served in various management positions for leading Hi-Tech companies, where he gained in-depth experience in both technological and business matters. He was also a member of the ‘Nova Project’, a country-wide organization providing strategic management consulting for non-profits in Israel. Oleg gained substantial technological training at an elite IDF Hi-tech unit, where he served as a team leader. For his pre-military training, Oleg completed practical engineering (PE) studies at the Israeli Air-Force College, focusing on networks, computer communications and microelectronics. In addition, Oleg holds both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in international business law as well as a degree in business and management, all with honors, from the Inter-Disciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel. Oleg teaches the “Legal Aspect of Entrepreneurship” course at Ben-Gurion University, serves as a mentor in various technological programs, incubators and accelerators, and is a frequent speaker in various technological events.
Mrs. Naftalovitch orchestrates the activities of multiple research labs working with local and multi-national companies. Among her responsibilities are budget planning and management, contracts initiation and maintenance, human resources strategy and implementation, businesses and university relationship management.
Yisroel Mirsky is a tenure-track lecturer and Zuckerman Faculty Scholar in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University. He received his Ph.D. from BGU in 2018 and was a postdoctoral fellow for two years in the at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the research labs of Prof. Wenke Lee. His main research interests include deepfakes, adversarial machine learning, anomaly detection, and intrusion detection. Dr. Mirsky has published his work in some of the best security venues: USENIX, CCS, NDSS, Euro S&P, Black Hat, DEF CON, RSA, CSF, AISec, etc. His research has also been featured in many well-known media outlets: Popular Science, Scientific American, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and BBC. Some of his works, include the exposure of vulnerabilities in the US 911 emergency services and research into the threat of deepfakes in medical scans, both featured in The Washington Post.
Prof Asaf Shabtai is a senior lecturer (Assistant Prof.) at the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University. Asaf is a recognized expert in information systems security and has led several large-scale projects and researches in this field. His main areas of interest are computer and network security, machine learning, cyber intelligence, security awareness, security of IoT and smart mobile devices, social network analysis, and security of avionic and operational technologies (OT) systems. Asaf holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science (1998); B.Sc. in Information Systems Engineering (1998); a M.Sc. in Information Systems Engineering (2003) and a Ph.D. in Information Systems Engineering (2011) all from Ben-Gurion University. Since 2005, Asaf has been a principle investigator and project manager of various research projects funded by Deutsche Telekom AG, (Telekom Innovation Laboratories @ BGU), Israeli Ministry of Defense, Israeli Ministry of Trade and Commerce, and several leading cyber security companies. Asaf has published over 70 refereed papers in leading peer-reviewed journals and conferences. In addition, he has co-authored a book on information leakage detection and prevention. Asaf also received the Toronto Award for young scientists in 2017.
Rami Puzis is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He received his B.Sc. degree in Software Engineering, M.Sc. in Information Systems Engineering, and Ph.D. from BGU. The topic of his dissertation was the deployment of distributed network intrusion detection systems. He was a research associate in the Laboratory of Computational Cultural Dynamics at the University of Maryland. His primary specialization is in the area of complex networks analysis with applications to cyber security, and social and communication network analysis. He has been the principal investigator of a series of research projects funded by Deutsche Telekom AG, the Israeli Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Economy, and several leading cyber security companies.
Bracha Shapira is a professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the incumbent of the Carole Weinstein Chair in Information Systems Engineering. She served as the Chair of the department between 2011 and 2017 and is now BGU’s Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences. She is a researcher at the Telecom Innovation Laboratories at BGU and BGU’s Cyber Security Center. She is a graduate of Hebrew University in Jerusalem (M.Sc. in Computer Science) and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Ph.D. in Information Systems Engineering). She leads numerous research projects related to personalization, user profiling, privacy, and the application of machine learning methods to cyber security and recommender systems. She has authored more than 120 papers in various leading conferences and journals.
Dr. Nir Nissim is a researcher and the Head of the Malware Lab at the Cyber Security Research Center at BGU. In 2016, Dr. Nissim completed his Ph.D. at BGU’s Department of Information Systems Engineering. He received a prestigious prize in recognition of his ranking with the Faculty of Engineering Sciences’ top doctoral students in 2016. During his Ph.D. research, Dr. Nissim won several best paper awards in top ranked scientific international conferences and awards of excellence at BGU, and he was one of the few doctoral students at BGU to win an exclusive doctoral cyber security scholarship granted by the Israeli Cyber Security Bureau. Dr. Nissim has published several noteworthy papers dealing with the development of a generic active learning framework aimed at the detection and acquisition of various types of malware in a variety of platforms. Dr. Nissim is expertizes in computers and information systems security as well as in machine learning, and he has been leading several large-scale research projects in the field, including collaborative projects between academia and industry. His main areas of interests are mobile and computer security, machine learning, and data mining. In addition to his contributions to the cyber security domain, Dr. Nissim is also interested in the biomedical informatics domain, in which he has published a number of papers regarding the efficient classification of condition severity. He is also a lecturer on cyber security and machine learning topics, both in the Information Systems Engineering Department at BGU, as well as in the Industrial Engineering and Management Department at Tel Aviv University. In addition, Dr. Nissim is the Head of the ICSML program, which is an international cyber-security and machine learning academic and professional program for international students.
Lior Rokach is a data scientist and Professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev where he serves as the head of the department. He established the Machine Learning and Big Data labs at BGU which promote innovative adaptations of machine learning and data science methods to create the next generation of intelligent systems. Lior has made significant contributions to the cyber security field by developing machine learning algorithms that are capable of identifying malwares and protecting user data and privacy.
Lior joined BGU in 2005 after receiving a B.Sc. (summa cum laude), M.Sc. (cum laude), and Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University. He is the author of over 100 peer reviewed papers in leading journals and six books including Data Leakage Detection and Prevention, Pattern Classification Using Ensemble Methods, Data Mining with Decision Trees, and Decomposition Methodology for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is also co-editor of several handbooks published by Springer (Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Handbook and Recommender Systems Handbook), and he is currently co-editing the Handbook of Computational Intelligence in Cyber Security.
Yossi Oren is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and a researcher at BGU’s Cyber Security Research Center. Prior to joining BGU, Yossi was a post-doctoral research scientist in the Network Security Lab at Columbia University and a member of the Security Lab at Samsung Research Israel. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Tel-Aviv University and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science.
His research interests include implementation security (power analysis and other hardware attacks and countermeasures; low-resource cryptographic constructions for lightweight computers) and cryptography in the real world (consumer and voter privacy in the digital era; web application security).
