Richard DeMillo
Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Chair of Computing
Chair, School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
Chair’s Message | The First Steps to Strategic Planning
February 26, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy Community, The School of Cybersecurity and Privacy held its first faculty retreat this week. Retreats are the first step in a strategic planning process. They are a good way to begin talking about what’s important (and what’s not). Most of the time, a retreat is a closed meeting.…
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Chair’s Message | Privacy Education: Our Second Pillar and an Opportunity
February 19, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy Community, As I have conversations about SCP with faculty, students, administrators, industry leaders, and others, the discussions frequently turn to privacy education. It’s not a surprising turn in conversations about a school that’s dedicated to cybersecurity and privacy. What role does it play in the school? Will there be privacy-focused degrees? Are there classes that are available now? SCP is…
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Chair’s Message | A School Taking Shape
Feb. 12, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy Community, Suddenly, I feel like a school chair. For the last six months SCP has been preparing to be a school. This week was like hopping onto a moving conveyer belt. We are admitting students to the school. The Fall 2021 class of incoming Ph.D. students will receive…
Chair’s Message | An Inflection Point for the Curriculum Talks
Feb. 5, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy Community, The most fascinating committee you haven’t heard about may be SCP’s Curriculum Committee. I can see the email now: “Really? Curriculum? DeMillo, you are indeed an academic geek.” Curriculum is important, but I understand that most people would find endless discussions of required courses, assessments, credits, and…
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Chair’s Message | A ‘Historic’ Faculty Meeting
January 29, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, I thought you’d like a peek at the first ever SCP faculty meeting, which took place on Tuesday. These are some of the people who are helping design the programs, labs, courses, and other experiences that will define the home of cybersecurity and privacy at Georgia Tech. I’ve attended a lot of faculty meetings in my…
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Chair’s Message | Digital Transformation has a Role in School’s Curriculum
Jan. 22, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Digital transformation, accelerated by the pandemic, continues to play out in front of us, forcing organizations to rethink how they operate, and creating space for new industries to innovate in ways that would have been improbable a few years ago. During last week’s open office hours, we talked once again about the SolarWinds breach (building…
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Chair’s Message | New Challenges and Opportunities in 2021
January 15, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Welcome back from the extended holiday break. I hope we can meet face to face in 2021. Besides all the political happenings in December, there was a year-end watershed moment for the new School of Cybersecurity and Privacy: the revelation that the ubiquitous SolarWinds Orion software had been breached by exploiting vulnerabilities in its software…
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Chair’s Message | Curriculum is Paramount
Dec. 4, 2020 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, You may have missed it in my message before Thanksgiving week, so it bears repeating: the whole point of a school at Georgia Tech is education. We are used to thinking about education in familiar terms: lectures, exams, grades, credits, degrees, semesters. And curriculum. I hope you noticed the emphasis on the word curriculum. It’s the…
Chair’s Message | Charting the Way Forward
Nov. 20, 2020 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Only two more weeks left this semester. It seems a little early to think about whether we are on track, but I am inspired by a conversation I just had with Georgia Tech CS 09 alumnus Kabir Barday. Kabir is the founder and CEO of OneTrust, a company he founded in 2016…
Chair’s Message | Governance and Research
Nov. 13, 2020 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, We are nearing the end of the semester. The familiar cadence of academic life at Georgia Tech does not yet have much impact on the new School of Cybersecurity and Privacy. We have no courses, offer no degrees, and enroll no students. Those milestones are still weeks…
Chair’s Message | Forward Momentum, and an Election
Nov. 6, 2020 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Everything seemed to take a backseat to national politics this week, but the elections were also an opportunity for SCP and our colleagues across the campus to make important contributions to cybersecurity and privacy for voting. McCamish Pavilion served as a polling location for the election and it was completely staffed by students, one of the first locations with that distinction. A unified effort at the institute…
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Chair’s Message | Putting the Pieces for Success into Place
Oct. 30, 2020 Dear GT Cybersecurity and Privacy community, We finished our first full month as a school with a hurricane. Thanks in part to Zeta. I had planned to open this letter by saying “with a flurry of meetings and events,” but I can’t find anyone who thinks this week has been only a flurry. We are on a very fast track to have most of the critical…
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Chair’s Message | Building Community
Oct. 23, 2020 Dear GT Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Forming a new school means enabling the mechanics of an academic unit — committees, budgets, facilities, curricula, hiring faculty and staff — and all of the back-office things that make it work. Those are things that we usually only notice when something goes wrong. Otherwise…
Chair’s Message | What Does It Mean to Be a School?
Oct. 16, 2020 Dear GT Cybersecurity and Privacy community, An academic school represents Georgia Tech’s permanent commitment to students and alumni to build a community of learners and advancing innovation. My hope is that the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy will squarely focus on this vision. A top goal must be to offer degrees and other credentials that map to new careers and roles in the cybersecurity industry. The culture we embrace…
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Chair’s Message | Welcome to a New Type of Academic Unit
Oct. 9, 2020 Dear GT Cybersecurity and Privacy community, The School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) was announced this September. SCP is Georgia Tech’s newest (and in many ways its most ambitious) academic department. I have the privilege and responsibility of serving as interim chair. We will meet new students and develop new programs even as we build on existing strengths. Georgia Tech’s commitment to cybersecurity predates the term, extending back more than 20 years to the Sam Nunn Forum which…
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