Dr.

Bhavani’s Diary (Working from Home during COVID-19) – Part 2

April 24, 2020 - June 5, 2020 (6 weeks)
This is a continuation of Dr. Bhavani’s Diary series. Dr. Bhavani’s Diary
(Working from Home using COVID-19) – Part 1 was published on April
24, 2020 after working from home for six weeks. During the first part it
was about getting used to working from home, establishing a
routine/schedule, giving a keynote address at CyberW, starting the
second half of the Spring semester and more importantly organizing the
2000-person virtual IEEE ICDE 2020 and also the WiDS Dallas Event.
So, in this current segment of the diary I discuss my work during the next
six weeks (April 4 – June 5, 2020).
While we have more or less gotten used to the daily routine of working from home, there
is still no end in sight for the COVID-19 Pandemic. The number of cases is still growing
and to date millions of cases have been reported with several hundred thousand deaths.
In US alone we are now close to two million cases and around 110,000 deaths. We are
hoping and praying for a vaccine soon. But what we can do now is take care of our health
and be fit and healthy as much as we can as that is within our control. At the same time
as I have mentioned in a recent motivational article I published (May 9, 2020), we must
take advantage of the opportunities in front of us. We have more time on our hands as
we don’t have to drive to work, do shopping or go out eating. We can use that time to
learn new technologies, read more research papers and expand our knowledge. As I
mentioned in my recent article, we may not get such an opportunity again and I hope we
do not get such an opportunity again as we do not want another global pandemic.
So back to the past six weeks, what have I been doing during this time? April 24 is when
we finished IEEE ICDE 2020 (including the WiDS Dallas event). I slept for the next 18 out
of the 24 hours and then focused on completing the Spring semester and some papers
for keynote addresses (to be given over the summer the Fall). I was teaching two courses
on Friday afternoons, the main course on Secure Cloud Computing and the other inn
experimental research in cyber security (which is more popularly known as the INSuRE
course working with several other universities). Finished the exams and grading for the
courses by May 12th or so and wrote some papers on integrating AI, Security and Social
Media (for ParSocial 2020) and Multi-Generational Inference Controllers (for IEEE Big
Data Security 2020 (this was a regular paper). I really enjoyed working on the papers
and also started recording the keynote and regular talks for the conferences and have
posted them on my YouTube channel. More importantly I recruited three female PhD
students. So hopefully in a few years I would have graduated 23 students (18 have
already graduated) out of which 12 would be women, 1 African American, 1 Latino
American and 1 from the LGBTQ community. I am so pleased that I more than 50% of
my PhD students would be women. I have to work harder to get more PhD students from
the disadvantaged minority communities.
Then on May 31 I recorded a presentation (around 1 hours) of our Cyber Secirity Institute
and this was also posted on YouTube. Here is the link to my YouTuibe channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdkdO2DUNqpqGLmeJjiXujA?
I also wrote a couple of proposals/white papers during this time and kept myself really
busy which helps when working from home. I organized my home office (in the small 2BR
2BA condo in Dallas) and my husband is also very busy with his work from home. Also,
we keep in touch with our son and his family a few times a week via FaceTime or Skype.
Over the next coupls ot weeks I will be doing more recoedings of my technical talks and
also plan to give some motivational talks to Women in Cyber Security as well as for
Women in Data Science. I was so pleased to read about one lady named Aksatha when
asked who motivated her to work in cyber security, her answer was the following:
“My mother is my guiding light. Her spirit of resilience was definitely behind my decision to choose
such a challenging career. That apart, stalwarts such as Bhavani Thuraisingham, who is a
distinguished Professor of computer science and the Executive Director of the Cyber Security
Research and Education Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas, are definitely paving the way
with research and passion. “

https://www.ilantus.com/blog/inclusive-and-growth-focused-women-in-
cybersecurity/
I also kept my communication with friends and colleagues in the US as well as abroad
(UK and Australia) via mostly Skype and have become quite an expert on Zoom as well
as WebEx, Teams, E-Leaning/Blackboard etc. I do not know when I will see my friends
and colleagues abroad next. Also, I do keep in touch with one of my two PhD advisors,
Dr. Roger Hindley at the University of Wales, Swansea (now called Swansea University
and the other was Dr. John Cleave at the University of Bristol), and I was pleasantly
surprised when I read an article published by Prof. John Tucker, the Deputy Pro Vice
Chancellor of the university (who was my colleague at the University of Bristol where I got
my Masters and started my PhD before moving to Wales following my husband). Here is
an excerpt of what he says.
“For much of Roger Hindley’s early career, the lambda calculus was a pure mathematical system that
had been created by Alonzo Church in the 1930s to model the philosophical foundations of what it
means to calculate the values of a function. It was inspired by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead’s
magisterial Principia Mathematica, in which they derived the basis of mathematics from radically new
concepts and rules of formal logic. An inspiration for other models of calculation rather than the object
of independent development, the lambda calculus had been kept alive by a small number of able pure
mathematicians who saw value in it as a very fundamental analytical tool. It began to attract the
attention of computer scientists interested in the design of programming languages. Notably, in the
1950s, the lambda calculus was the computational model underlying John McCarthy’s language LISP,
which aimed at AI applications. Bruce Lercher and Jonathan P Seldin visited Swansea and in due
course they authored what became highly influential books internationally, Hindley [1972, 1986].
Hindley’s work on inferring types chimed with Milner’s language interests, and Hindley-Milner type
systems, with their polymorphism and type inference, entered the theory and practice of programming
language design.[54] One Swansea mathematical logic PhD was Bhavani Thuraisingham, who studied
computability under Hindley and John Cleave (Bristol). She went on to work with distinction in the
USA, on database security for the MITRE Corporation for 16 years, including a three-year stint as a
Program Director at the NSF, before becoming professor at University of Texas at Dallas [55]”.
 The footnotes [54] and [55] are the following:
[54] See Hindley [1969]. Hindley has written of these early times in Hindley [2008].
[55] She won the 1997 Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Computer
society: https://www.computer.org/web/awards/technical-bhavani-thuraisingham and became an
ACM Fellow in 2018.

https://collections.swansea.ac.uk/s/swansea-2020/page/computer-science
On May 29, I started the summer session. I love teaching (almost as much as I love
research) and am passionate about educating students. After working so hard all these
years finally I got “exceeding expectations” evaluation for my teaching and I was thrilled.
In any case the class I am teaching is “Analyzing and Securing Social Media”. I usually
teach it in the Fall but this time I am teaching it in the summer as I will be teaching Big
Data Security and Privacy in the Fall. My usual summer class is on Cyber Security
Essentials which covers the CISSP modules. Since we have more time on our hands, I
also got an opportunity to review lot of topics like Advanced Statistics, Mathematical
Logic, Formal Methods in Cyber Security and Machine Learning (of course including
some of the recent developments in the fields). Also, to keep my mind sharp I memorize
a new song lyric or a poem almost every day (sometimes it takes me multiple days to
memorize a poem). So, I have been somewhat enjoying my life. Finally, I started my
Instagram posts (the account was created in 2018) and I use it only for professional work.
Even though I have quite a public profile, especially with social media such as Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube and now Instagram, I try my best to keep my private life private.
So, what are my plans for the next six weeks? Will continue with my teaching, have to
start writing the book on Secure Data Science, finish some more papers for conferences
in July and August and also start planning for the Fall. We do not know what will happen
in the Fall but we think it will likely be online teaching again. There is so much to do with
work, social media (also professional work) and planning for the future etc. I had hoped
that we would be able to move to NYC in the near future to be close to our son and his
family and maintain minimum presence in Dallas and Boston (for my husband) but now
with COVID-19 we don’t know what to expect. For now, we are grateful that we are alive.
That brings me to all the sad events going on – such as the Protests against the brutal
murders of African Americans by the police. I really believe that race education should be
a must at every school from K-12. It has to start early; that people look different but we
are all God’s children. When it is ingrained into you that certain people are inferior at a
very young age it is almost impossible to be tolerant of other people later on in life. That
is why its crucial we start early. I understand it as I am a Tamil from Sri-Lanka and even
though I left S-Lanka in 1975 and most of my 20 years living there was peaceful, I felt that
there was resentment between the different races. That is why I believe that one has to
ingrain into the children that while people may look different, they are all the same.
Hope that we are all safe and well and will post Dr. Bhavani’s Diary Part 3 on July 17.
Unfortunately, we won’t be watching Wimbledon this year – I am going to miss the event
because if it is July then it is Wimbledon. On the positive side hope I can use those hours
and do some useful work instead of watching TV.