Richard DeMillo
Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Chair of Computing
Chair, School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
Chair’s Message | What Amazon whispered in my ear
Nov. 19, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Some words of encouragement to SCP students as we are nearing the end of the semester: Hang in there. Rest is coming soon. For some of you the end of the Fall 2021 semester means graduation, time to think about life after Georgia Tech. As some of you know, we hosted the…
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Chair’s Message | Creative Conflict and Shared Goals
Nov. 5, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, There has been a great deal of internal discussion recently about community and shared goals as well as how to bring together individuals with differing interests in a space where they can achieve at the highest levels possible. I wanted to continue this dialog and expand it to all our audiences. It is vital that we stay honest with…
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Chair’s Message | Busy Times
Oct. 29, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, We are in the final few weeks of the Fall 2021 semester and as we make our way towards finishing up our first 12 months of course offerings, things are as busy as ever. This week I wanted to give you a look at what we are…
Chair’s Message | Some Weeks are Harder than Others
Oct. 22, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, It’s been over a year since I started writing these letters to generate discussions that I hoped would build the SCP community and keep you up to date on developments in our growing school. Every week, I try to be upbeat. That’s typically easy because we have…
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Chair’s Message | Events and Announcements
Oct. 15, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Next Friday will mark the one-year anniversary of my chair letter. I am looking forward to using next week’s letter to reflect on how we have grown as a school and a community. This week I want to talk about some upcoming SCP events as well as…
Chair’s Message | Student Research Highlights
Sept. 24, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, As I mentioned last week, our school had eight papers accepted to the upcoming Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer and Communications Security, a tier one academic conference. Since we are celebrating SCP students this fall, I will take time this week to highlight some of the student involvement…
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Chair’s Message | Plans for a Student Town Hall
Sept. 17, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Many thanks to all the faculty and students who came to last week’s steering committee for the Student Town Hall we are planning for later in the semester. As I have mentioned a few times already, I want to focus on student involvement this year. Interest in…
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Chair’s Message | Student Events
Sept. 10, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, The last two weeks have been a whirlwind as we press forward into a new semester and double down on our promise to bolster student engagement across the board. We kicked off our weekly lecturer series last week with a talk on Side Channel Attacks led by…
Chair’s Message | Welcome Back
Aug. 23, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Welcome to the new semester for the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy! Classes start this week. So do dozens of other routines that mark an academic year. Of course the “routines” are not so routine for us yet. It may not have been apparent to you last…
Chair’s Message | Tackling the Big Issues for Students
Aug. 13, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, More on what student success might mean for the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy. There is always a tension between keeping a college curriculum up-to-date and chasing after the latest fad. We academics try to put a brave face on it, but changing long-established courses is an…
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Chair’s Message | Making Experiential Student Learning a SCP Cornerstone
Aug. 6, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, I want to continue the conversation I started in last week’s letter about the school’s investment in cybersecurity students. We know that our students are invested in Georgia Tech, but I want that to be a two-way street: we are invested in their success too. That investment…
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Chair’s Message | Students at the Forefront
July 30, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, You may have noticed that I devoted a lot of space in these letters last year to faculty matters – finding, recruiting, and blending them into a new school with its own way of doing business and a new culture suited to cybersecurity and privacy (in case…
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Chair’s Message | Welcome to the Inaugural SCP Faculty Cohort
July 23, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, It’s a little unreal to think that full campus operations are finally restarting after more than a year of our community being away from campus. Many of you are back already and reacquainting yourself with a regular routine. After today, we’re exactly 20 business days out from…
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Chair’s Message | Graduation Weekend
May 7, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Spring semester is officially a wrap, and starting this morning, members of the Graduating Class of Spring 2021 will take part in commencement ceremonies. Congratulations to all the graduates who are being conferred degrees and a special job well done to the students in our cybersecurity graduate…
Chair’s Message | What’s Next?
April 16, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, It’s been a bit frenetic; I know. There’s a lot of new stuff to do. Between transferring faculty members to the new school, interviewing new professors, starting a new curriculum, and introducing the school to the world (“Hello, World!”), it’s been amazing how much time I got…
Chair’s Message | Extending Our Reach
April 9, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, As we hit the final stretch of spring semester, the school community – faculty, students, operations staff, administration, and external supporters – continue to engage and lay the groundwork for the coming fall. We are constantly looking forward, but we also have some high-visibility activity taking place…
Chair’s Message | Intercollege Academic Model Taking Form
April 2, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, Who ultimately oversees this new school that runs point for cybersecurity and privacy education activity on behalf of all the academic colleges at Georgia Tech? This is a question that comes up frequently as we build the model for an intercollege academic unit. SCP has an administrative…
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Chair’s Message | The First Two Years: Online Master of Science in Cybersecurity
March 26, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, This week included a mid-semester break from instruction, so I hope you had a chance to take some time for yourselves. The school has been working this semester with Georgia Tech Professional Education, which administers the Online Master of Science in Cybersecurity degree program (OMS Cyber), to…
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Chair’s Message | A Statewide Initiative in Cybersecurity and Privacy Education
March 19, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, On Wednesday, education representatives from around the state convened virtually in the first workshop held by the Georgia Cybersecurity and Privacy Roadmap Taskforce. Condensing the 90-minute session into a few themes can’t fully capture all the topics presented, but if I had to characterize the meeting, I…
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Chair’s Message | Possible Futures for SCP
March 12, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community, I read and respond to all correspondence (if you sent me something and have not heard back from me yet, please send it again), but I don’t always have time to expand on ideas that deserve a fuller discussion. There were a dozen emails this week about…
Chair’s Message | Taking the Long View
March 5, 2021 Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy Community, Thanks to all of you who commented on last week’s letter about the themes that came out of the faculty retreat. There will be working groups of students, faculty, alumni, and external stakeholders to expand the themes into narratives that will feed the strategic planning process beginning…
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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