Bharath Samanthula | Computer Science | Montclair State University

Bharath K. Samanthula is an Associate Professor (tenured) of the School of Computing at Montclair State University. He joined the computer science department at Montclair in Fall 2015. Prior to joining Montclair, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Cyber Center Department and also served as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.

His main research covers many areas in the fields of privacy-enhanced technologies, bigdata analytics and applied cryptography. He is one of the senior faculty members heading the Cybersecurity Lab. He also leads (PI) the NSF REU Site: Enhancing Undergraduate Research Experiences in Cybersecurity and Privacy-Enhanced Technologies at Montclair. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.

At Montclair, he has been serving as the Graduate Program Coordinator for MS-Cybersecurity program since its inception. If you are interested in learning more about our Cybersecurity degree options, please contact me at samanthulab@montclair.edu

The primary focus of my research is to develop enhanced security and privacy-preserving models for distributed computing environments. My research interests span across the following areas:

Information Security
Applied Cryptography
Privacy-Enhanced Technologies
Big Data Analytics and Management
Cloud Computing
Wireless Sensor Networks
Online Social Networks
Cyber-Physical Systems

Additionally, our research team develops novel approaches to invigorate STEM education in local schools via the development of computational thinking tools and virtual cloud-based interactive Web platforms.

Selected Research Projects

Privacy-Preserving and Collaborative Data Analytics in Cloud
Optimized Secure Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks
Privacy-Aware and User-Centric Data Management in Cloud
Secure Retrieval of Top-K Similar Documents in Outsourced Databases

Over the past decade, I taught a diversified set of CS courses, ranging from programming and software engineering topics to computer and network security courses for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Montclair State University (all course material is available on Canvas)

Fall 2023: CSIT 315 - Software Engineering
Fall 2023: CSIT 561 - Computer Security
Summer 2023: CSIT 560 - Network Security
Summer 2023: CSIT 495/595 - Cloud Computing
Spring 2023: CSIT 535 - Human Computer Interaction
Spring 2023: CSIT 565 - Information Security Management
Spring 2023: CSIT 567 - Cryptography
Fall 2022: CSIT 104 - Python Programming
Fall 2022: CSIT 561 - Computer Security
Summer 2022: CSIT 560 - Network Security
Summer 2022: CSIT 495/595 - Cloud Computing
Spring 2022: CSIT 565 - Information Security Management
Spring 2022: CSIT 567 - Cryptography
Fall 2021: CSIT 111 - Fundamentals of Programming
Fall 2021: CSIT 561 - Computer Security
Summer 2021: CSIT 504 - Discrete Mathematics
Summer 2021: CSIT 560 - Network Security
Summer 2021: CSIT 495/595 - Cloud Computing
Spring 2021: CSIT 566 - Computer Forensics
Spring 2021: CSIT 567 - Cryptography
Fall 2020: CSIT 561 - Computer Security
Fall 2020: CSIT 460 - Computer Security
Summer 2020: CSIT 560 - Network Security
Summer 2020: CSIT 561 - Computer Security
Spring 2020: CSIT 567 - Cryptography
Spring 2020: CSIT 460 - Computer Security
Fall 2019: CSIT 561 - Computer Security
Fall 2019: CSIT 460 - Computer Security
Summer 2019: CSIT 495/595 - Cloud Computing
Spring 2019: CSIT 560 - Network Security
Spring 2019: CSIT 460 - Computer Security
Fall 2018: CSIT 561 - Computer Security
Fall 2018: CSIT 460 - Computer Security
Summer 2018: CSIT 495/595 - Cloud Computing
Spring 2018: CSIT 560 - Network Security
Spring 2018: CSIT 460 - Computer Security
Fall 2017: CSIT 495/567 - Introduction to Cryptography
Fall 2017: CSIT 104 - Computational Concepts
Summer 2017: CSIT 595 - Cloud Computing
Spring 2017: CSIT 460 - Computer Security
Spring 2017: CSIT 104 - Computational Concepts
Fall 2016: CSIT 495/595 - Introduction to Cryptography
Fall 2016: CSIT 104 - Computational Concepts
Spring 2016: CSIT 460 - Computer Security
Fall 2015: CSIT 495/595 - Introduction to Cryptography
Fall 2015: CSIT 345 - Operating Systems

Purdue University (all course material is available on Blackboard)

Summer 2015: CS 31400 - Numerical Methods
Spring 2015: CS 54701 - Information Retrieval
Fall 2014: CS 47300 - Web Information Retrieval & Management

Journal Articles

Allen Yang, Boxiang Dong, Dawei Li, Weifeng Sun and Bharath K. Samanthula, "DeepICU: Imbalanced Classification by using Deep Neural Networks for Network Intrusion Detection", International Journal of Big Data Intelligence. To appear.
Debasmita Basu, Nicole Panorkou, Michelle Zhu, Pankaj Lal and Bharath K. Samanthula, "Exploring the Mathematics of Gravity", Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School Journal, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. To appear.
Bharath K. Samanthula and Wei Jiang, "Secure Multiset Intersection Cardinality and its Application to Jaccard Coefficient", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 591-604, 2016.
Bharath K. Samanthula, Lei Cen, Wei Jiang and Luo Si, "Privacy-Preserving and Efficient Friend Recommendation in Online Social Networks", Transactions on Data Privacy (TDP), June 27, 2015.
Bharath K. Samanthula, Yousef Elmehdwi and Wei Jiang, "k-Nearest Neighbor Classification over Semantically Secure Encrypted Relational Data", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), October 19, 2014.
Bharath K. Samanthula and Wei Jiang, "A Randomized Approach for Structural and Message based Private Friend Recommendation in Online Social Networks", State of the Art Applications of Social Network Analysis, Lecture Notes in Social Networks, Springer, May 15, 2014.
Bharath K. Samanthula, Hu Chun, Wei Jiang and Bruce M. McMillin, "Secure and Threshold-based Power Usage Control in Smart Grid Environments", International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems (IJPEDS), Taylor & Francis, November 6, 2013.
Bharath K. Samanthula and Wei Jiang, "Interest-Driven Private Friend Recommendation", Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS), Springer, October 15, 2013.
Bharath K. Samanthula, Yousef Elmehdwi, Gerry Howser and Sanjay Madria, "A Secure Data Sharing and Query Processing Framework via Federation of Cloud Computing", Information Systems, an Elsevier Journal, August 31, 2013.

Refereed Conferences and Workshops

Bharath K. Samanthula, Mirza Mehran, Michelle M. Zhu, Nicole Panorkou and Pankaj Lal, "Experiences Toward An Interactive Cloud-Based Learning System for STEM Education", In the 10th IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference (ISEC), Princeton, NJ, USA, 2020.
Boxiang Dong, Wendy Hui Wang, Aparna S. Varde, Dawei Li, Bharath K. Samanthula, Weifeng Sun and Liang Zhao, "Cyber Intrusion Detection by Using Deep Neural Networks with Attack-sharing Loss", In the IEEE International Conference on Big Data Intelligence and Computing (IEEE DataCom), Kaohsiung, Taiwan, November 18-21, 2019.
Bharath K. Samanthula, Salha Albehairi and Boxiang Dong, "A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Collaborative Association Rule Mining in Cloud", In the IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Fog Computing Technologies and Applications (IEEE Cloud Summit), Washington D.C., USA, August 8-10, 2019.
Mona Alkanhal and Bharath K. Samanthula, "A Privacy-Aware Framework for Friend Recommendations in Online Social Networks", In the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (IEEE CSE), New York, USA, August 1-3, 2019.
Michelle Zhu, Nicole Panorkou, Sowmith Etikyala, Debasmita Basu, Taheeda Street-Conaway, Pricilla Iranah, Daniel Mazol, Corey Hannum, Ryan Marshall, Pankaj Lal and Bharath K. Samanthula, "Steerable Environmental Simulations for Exploratory Learning", World Conference on E-Learning, Las Vegas, Nevada, October 15-18, 2018.
Bharath K. Samanthula, James Liporace and Martin Issiov, "A Privacy-Aware and User-Centric Approach for Query Processing in Cloud", IEEE International Conference on Smart Cloud, New York, USA, September 21-23, 2018.
Sam Forman and Bharath K. Samanthula, "Secure Similar Document Detection: Optimized Computation Using the Jaccard Coefficient", in the 4th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity), Omaha, NE, USA, May 3-5, 2018.
Michelle Zhu, Nicole Panorkou, Pankaj Lal, Sowmith Etikyala, Erell Feb Germia, Pricilla Iranah, Bharath K. Samanthula and Debasmita Basu, "Integrating Interactive Computer Simulations into K-12 Earth and Environmental Science", In the 8th IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference (ISEC), Princeton, NJ, USA, March 10, 2018.
Bharath K. Samanthula, "Privacy-preserving outsourced collaborative frequent itemset mining in the cloud", In the IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Boston, MA, USA, December 11-14, 2017.
Martin Issiov and Bharath K. Samanthula, Efficient Secure Comparison Over Encrypted Integers and Its Application to Privacy-Preserving Range Query in Cloud", In the IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, November 3-5, 2017.
Scott Thompson and Bharath K. Samanthula, "Optimized Secure Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks", In the 15th International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), Calgary, Alberta, Canada, August 28-30, 2017.
Fang-Yu Rao, Bharath K. Samanthula, Elisa Bertino, Xun Yi and Dongxi Liu, "Privacy-Preserving and Outsourced Multi-User k-Means Clustering", In the IEEE International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC), Hangzhou, China, October 27-30, 2015. [Best Paper Award]
Bharath K. Samanthula, Fang-Yu Rao, Elisa Bertino and Xun Yi, "Privacy-Preserving Protocols for Shortest Path Discovery over Outsourced Encrypted Graph Data", In the 16th IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI), San Francisco, California, USA, August 13-15, 2015.
Elisa Bertino and Bharath K. Samanthula , "Security with Privacy - A Research Agenda", In the 10th IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom), Miami, Florida, USA, October 22-25, 2014.
Bharath K. Samanthula , Wei Jiang and Elisa Bertino, "Privacy-Preserving Complex Query Evaluation over Semantically Secure Encrypted Data", In the 19th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), Wroclaw, Poland, September 7-11, 2014.
Yousef Elmehdwi, Bharath K. Samanthula and Wei Jiang, "Secure k-Nearest Neighbor Query over Encrypted Data in Outsourced Environments", In the IEEE 30th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Chicago, IL, USA, March 31-April 4, 2014.
Bharath K. Samanthula and Wei Jiang, "Efficient Privacy-Preserving Range Queries over Encrypted Data in Cloud Computing", In the IEEE 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD), Santa Clara Marriott, CA, USA, June 27-July 2, 2013.
Bharath K. Samanthula, Wei Jiang and Sanjay Madria, "A Probabilistic Encryption based Min/Max Computation in Wireless Sensor Networks", In the 14th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM), Milan, Italy, June 3-6, 2013.
Bharath K. Samanthula, Chun Hu and Wei Jiang, "An Efficient and Probabilistic Secure Bit-Decomposition", In the 8th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), Hangzhou, China, May 8-10, 2013.
Bharath K. Samanthula, Gerry Howser, Yousef Elmehdwi and Sanjay Madria, "An Efficient and Secure Data Sharing Framework using Homomorphic Encryption in the Cloud", ACM International Workshop on Cloud Intelligence (Cloud-I) in conjunction with VLDB 2012, Istanbul, Turkey, August 31, 2012.
Bharath K. Samanthula and Wei Jiang, "Structural and Message based Private Friend Recommendation", In Proceedings of IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2012), Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey, August 26 - 29, 2012.
Wei Jiang and Bharath K. Samanthula, "A Secure and Distributed Framework to Identify and Share Needed Information", In the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT 2011), MIT, Boston, USA, October 9-11, 2011.
Wei Jiang and Bharath K. Samanthula, "N-Gram Based Secure Similar Document Detection", In the 25th Annual WG 11.3 Conference on Data and Applications Security (DBSEC 2011), Richmond, Virginia, July 11-13, 2011.

Selected Research Collaborators

Prof. Elisa Bertino (Purdue University)
Prof. Wei Jiang (Missouri S&T)
Prof. Christopher S. Leberknight (Montclair State University)
Prof. Michelle Zhu (Montclair State University)
Prof. Boxiang Dong (Montclair State University)
Prof. Xun Yi (RMIT, Australia)
Dr. Dongxi Liu (CSIRO Computational Informatics, Australia)
Prof. Luo Si (Purdue University)
Prof. Sanjay Madria (Missouri S&T)
Prof. Bruce McMillin (Missouri S&T)

Selected Technical Reports

Bharath K. Samanthula, Fang-Yu Rao, Elisa Bertino, Xun Yi and Dongxi Liu, "Privacy-Preserving and Outsourced Multi-User k-Means Clustering", eprint, arXiv, December 14, 2014.
Bharath K. Samanthula, Yousef Elmehdwi and Wei Jiang, "k-Nearest Neighbor Classification over Semantically Secure Encrypted Relational Data", eprint, arXiv, March 19, 2014.
Bharath K. Samanthula, Wei Jiang and Elisa Bertino, "Lightweight and Secure Two-Party Range Queries over Outsourced Encrypted Databases", eprint, arXiv, January 15, 2014.
Yousef Elmehdwi, Bharath K. Samanthula and Wei Jiang, "Secure k-Nearest Neighbor Query over Encrypted Data in Outsourced Environments", eprint, arXiv, July 18, 2013.
Bharath K. Samanthula and Wei Jiang, "N-gram Based Secure Similar Document Detection", Dept. of Computer Science, Missouri S&T, Rolla, February 11, 2011.

Bharath K. Samanthula, PhD