The Team

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.

Danny Hendler received his B.Sc. degree in Mathematics and Computer Science and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University. In 2001 he returned to academia after spending 18 years in Israel’s hi-tech industry, holding various technical and managerial positions. He joined the Department of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2006 and is currently an Associate Professor in the department. Since 2014 he has served as the vice head of BGU’s Cyber Security Research Center. His key research interests are distributed and parallel computation, cyber security, and complex network analysis.

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.

Mordechai Guri is the head of R&D of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Cyber-Security Research Center. He earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc from the Computer Science Department at Hebrew University and received his Ph.D. from BGU. He was awarded the prestigious IBM Ph.D. International Fellowship in 2015. Mordechai manages academic research in various aspects of cyber security for the commercial and governmental sectors. He has led a number of breakthrough research projects in cyber security, focusing primarily on state of the art challenges in the fields of cyber attack and cyber defense. Mordechai examines current paradigms and develops new methods for improved mitigation of security problems in the modern cyber environment. His research topics include OS security, advanced malware, moving target defense (MTD), mobile security and embedded systems.

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.

Amos Beimel received his B.A., M.Sc., and D.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. After graduating from the Technion, he spent one year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science (DIMACS) at Rutgers University and two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University. In 1999, he joined the Department of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he is now a Professor; he later served as the head of the department (2012-2014). In 2005-2006, he spent a year as a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis.

His research interests include cryptography and complexity theory. He focuses on secret sharing schemes, private information retrieval, and secure multiparty computation.  He has published more than 50 papers in prestigious journals and conferences, received grants from the Israel Science Foundation and Israel’s Ministry of Science and Ministry of Economy, and served on the program committees of various conferences.

Dr 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.

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.

Ehud Gudes recieved his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from Ohio State University. Following his Ph.D. studies, he worked both in academia (Penn State University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Florida Atlantic University), where he conducted research in the areas of database systems and data security, and in industry (Wang Laboratories, National Semiconductors, Elron, and IBM Research), where he developed query languages, CAD software, and expert systems.
He has published over 120 papers in those areas, served as a consultant to several companies, and chaired several international conferences, including the 2002 and 2009 IFIP WG11.3 conference on data and application security and the 2011 and 2014 IFIPTM conferences on trust management.
Ehud’s research interests encompass the database and security domains, and he currently focuses on two areas: database security and privacy, and data mining, particularly graph and sequence mining. In recent years he has received many research grants from industry, including grants from Duetche Telekom and IBM, as well as from Israel’s Ministry of Economy’s Magnet program in the areas of the smart grid and cyber security. He currently leads several research projects in data security.
He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has served as the head of the department and the head of the software engineering program. In addition, he is a member of both the ACM and IEEE Computer Society and an active member of the IFIP WG11.3 group on database security.

Gabriel Scalosub has a B.Sc. in mathematics and philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (1996), and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science from the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa (2002 and 2007, respectively). In 2008, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, and in 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada. In October 2009, he joined the Department of Communication Systems Engineering at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He served on various technical program committees, including INFOCOM, IWQoS, IFIP-Networking, ICCCN, and WCNC. His research interests include theoretical algorithmic issues arising in various networking environments, including buffer management, scheduling, wireless networks, and cyber security. He is also interested in broader aspects of combinatorial optimization, online algorithms, approximation algorithms, and algorithmic game theory.

Haim Permuter received his B.Sc. (summa cum laude) from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in in Electrical Engineering, in 1997 and 2008, respectively. Between 1997 and 2004, he served as a scientific research officer in an R&D unit of the Israeli Defense Forces. In 2002 he worked at IBM Research – Almaden. He was the recipient of the following prestigious awards and fellowships: Fulbright Fellowship, Eshkol Fellowship, Wolf Prize, Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and Allon Fellowship. Haim joined BGU’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2008 and is now an associate professor.

Itai Dinur is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.  He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees at the Weizmann Institute of Science where his research was focused on the topic of methods in cryptanalysis of secret key algorithms.  He also spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher in the cryptography group at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.  His research interests are in the areas of computer and cyber security.  His research is focused on the design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms.

Kobi Cohen received a B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Bar-Ilan University, in 2007 and 2013, respectively. In 2015, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev as a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor). Prior to that he worked at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2014-2015) and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis (2012-2014) as a post-doctoral research associate. His main research interests include decision theory, stochastic optimization, statistical inference and learning, and game theory, with applications in large-scale systems, cyber systems, and wireless and wireline networks. Kobi received several awards including the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOpt) 2015, the Feder Family Award (second prize) granted by the Advanced Communication Center at Tel Aviv University (2011), and the President’s Fellowship (2008–2012), Rector’s Prize (2006, 2011), and Dean’s Prize (2010) from Bar-Ilan University.

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.

Mark Last is a Professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the head of the Data Mining and Software Quality Engineering Group. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Tel Aviv University in 2000. Prior to his appointment at Ben-Gurion University, Mark was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida. He also served as the head of BGU’s Software Engineering Program.
He has published over 190 peer-reviewed papers and 10 books on data mining, text mining, and cyber security including Fighting Terror in Cyberspace (World Scientific, 2005). Mark is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society and a Professional Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He currently serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics and an Editorial Board Member of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. For nearly ten years he served as an Associate Editor of Pattern Analysis and Applications. His main research interests are focused on data mining, cross-lingual text mining, cyber intelligence, and medical informatics.

Meir Kalech completed his Ph.D. at the Computer Science Department of Bar-Ilan University in 2006. In 2008 he became a faculty member of the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests lie in artificial intelligence, and more specifically in the area of anomaly detection and diagnosis. He is a recognized expert in model-based diagnosis (MBD) and has published dozens of papers in leading journals and refereed conferences. He established the Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis Laboratory at BGU which promotes research with the government and leading corporations such as General Motors, Mekorot, and IBM. Meir has served as a senior program committee for leading AI conferences such as the AAAI, IJCAI, AAMAS, and the International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis.

Michael Segal is a Professor in the Department of Communication Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and served as the head of the department from 2005 to 2010. He also held a visiting professorship at Cambridge University. He received the Toronto Prize for Research in 2010, and has published over 140 scientific papers. His research focuses on algorithmic networking theory. Michael serves as the Managing Editor of one of the most influential journals in the area of computer and system sciences, the Journal of Computer and System Sciences. The problems he tackles are fundamental optimization problems that have applications in transportation, station placement, communication, security and privacy, facility location, graph theory, statistics, selection, geometric pattern matching, layout of VLSI circuits, and enumeration. His research has been funded by many academic and industrial organizations including the Israeli Science Foundation, Deutche Telecom, IBM, France Telecom, the US Air Force, INTEL, General Motors and many others.

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.

http://www.malware-lab.com/head-of-malware-lab

Or Sattath is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His main interests are quantum cryptography, quantum complexity and quantum algorithms, and theory of computer science at large. Previously, he was a postdoc at UC Berkeley, the Hebrew University and MIT. He finished his PhD. under the supervision of Prof. Dorit Aharonov at the Hebrew University, and Prof. Julia Kempe at Tel-Aviv University.

Ofer Hadar received his B.Sc., M.Sc. (cum laude), and Ph.D. degrees from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in 1990, 1992, and 1997, respectively, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was the recipient of the prestigious Clore Fellowship which supported his Ph.D. studies. His Ph.D. dissertation dealt with the effects of vibrations and motion on image quality and target acquisition.

After completing his studies he was a visiting scientist at the Central Florida University’s College of Optics & Photonics (CREOL) working on angular dependence of sampling and oversampling MTF and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. In 1999 Ofer joined the Department of Communication Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Currently, he is an Associate Professor and the head of the department. His research interests include image compression, advanced video coding, H.264, SVC, packet video, transmission of video over IP networks, and image processing.

Since 2011, Ofer has served as an Associate Editor of the Optical Engineering journal. He also works as a consultant for various hi-tech companies in Israel, and is a senior member of IEEE and SPIE.

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.

Roni Stern became a faculty member in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering in 2013. He currently serves as the president of the Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS), and prior to this has served as the program chair of several workshops including the International Symposium on the Principles of Diagnosis (DX) and the Workshop on Distributed Multi-Agent Planning (DMAP). His research interests include heuristic search, automated diagnosis, single and multi-agent automated planning, and automated debugging and testing. He is also interested in applications of AI to health care. He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and held a post-doctoral position at Harvard University.

Shlomi Dolev received a B.Sc. in Engineering and a B.A., M.Sc., and D.Sc. in Computer Science from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He conducted post-doctoral research at Texas A&M University where he served as a visiting research specialist. In 1995, he joined Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and in 2000 he became the founding chair of BGU’s Department of Computer Science where he holds the Rita Altura Trust Chair in Computer Science. After just 15 years, the department has been ranked among the 150 best departments in the world. He also served as the Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences (2011-2014). He is currently the head of BGU’s Frankel Center for Computer Science
In addition to his positions at BGU, he was the head of the Inter-University Computation Center of Israel for six years. In 2015, he co-founded Secret Double Octopus Ltd. where he is now a board member and the CSO. He also co-founded SecretSky (SecretSkyDB) Ltd. in 2016. In 2015, Shlomi was appointed as the steering committee head for the computer science discipline at Israel’s Ministry of Education.
He is the author of a book entitled Self-Stabilization published by MIT Press in 2000. His publications more than three hundred conferences, journals and patents. The publications are largely in the area of distributed computing and communication networks, and more specifically on the self-stabilization property of such systems, cryptography, security, brain science, and optical computing. Several agencies and companies support his research including the ISF, NSF, IBM (faculty awards), EMC, Intel, Orange France, Deutsche Telekom, the Israeli Ministries of Science, Economy, and Defense, and the European Union in the sum of several millions of dollars.
While at BGU, Shlomi has had visiting positions at several institutions, including MIT, Paris 11, Paris 6, and DIMACS. He has served on more than a hundred program committees, chairing several, including the two leading conferences in distributed computing, DISC 2006, and PODC 2014. Shlomi has served as an Associate Editor in several international journals including the IEEE Transactions on Computers journal. His numerous research students have obtained positions in hi-tech companies, including IBM, Microsoft, and Google, as well as academia.

Tirza Routtenberg is a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. Her research interests include signal processing in smart grid, statistical signal processing, estimation and detection theory, and signal processing on graphs. She was a recipient of the Best Student Paper Award in four International Conferences. She was awarded the Marc Rich foundation prize in 2011 and Toronto prize in 2021.

Ya’akov (Kobi) Gal is a faculty member of the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and an associate of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His work investigates representations and algorithms for making decisions in heterogeneous groups comprising both people and computational agents. He has worked on combining artificial intelligence algorithms with educational technology aimed at supporting students’ educational efforts and teachers’ understanding of students’ learning strategies. He has published over 40 papers in highly refereed venues on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to learning and cognitive sciences. He is a recipient of the Wolf Foundation’s 2013 Krill prize for young Israeli scientists, a Marie Curie international fellowship, and a three-time recipient of Harvard University’s outstanding teacher award.

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).

holds advanced degrees in Medicine, Computer Science, and Medical Informatics. After a decade at Stanford University as a researcher and full-time faculty member in Computer Science and Medicine, he joined Ben-Gurion University of the Negev where he founded and headed the Medical Informatics Research Center.  He is a Professor in BGU’s Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering which he also headed for several years; he is the incumbent of the Josef Erteschik Chair in Information Systems Engineering at BGU.  In 2005, he received an IBM Faculty Award and an HP Worldwide Innovation Program Award in 2008. In 2005 he was elected as an International Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), and in 2017, as a Founding Member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI), a part of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA).  His research focuses on temporal reasoning, temporal data mining, automated therapy, and decision analysis. His work has been applied in the biomedical, homeland security, and information security domains.

Ilya Draigor is the IT Manager at the Telekom Innovation Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University and BGU’s Cyber Security Research Center. He is responsible for all IT infrastructure (computers, servers, network, tech support, websites, and more) and has over 15 years of experience.