Kui Ren

Biography

Kui Ren is SUNY Empire Innovation Professor and the director of the Ubiquitous Security and Privacy Research Laboratory (UbiSeC) in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where he joined in 2012 as an associate professor and was promoted to full professor in 2016. Previously, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), where he received early tenure and promotion in five years starting 2007. He received degrees from three different majors, i.e., his Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA, in 2007, M.Eng in Materials Engineering in 2001, and B.Eng in Chemical Engineering in 1998, both from Zhejiang University, China. His current research interests include Data and Computation Outsourcing Security in the context of Cloud Computing, Wireless Systems Security in the context of Internet of Things, and Crowdsourcing-based Large-scale Data Acquisition. He has published frequently in peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. His H-index is 54, and his total citation has exceeded 19,000, according to Google Scholar (as of Aug. 2017). More than 10 of his publications have been each cited more than 600 times, with the highest exceeding 2,000. His research has also been widely covered by the media, including CBS News, Scientific American, NSF News, ACM TechNews, Science Daily, The Conversation, etc. He has delivered more than 100 keynote/invited talks at conferences and universities worldwide. He received IEEE Communications & Information Security Technical Committee (CISTC) Technical Recognition Award in 2017, Exceptional Scholar Award for Sustained Achievement, UB in 2016, SEAS Senior Researcher of the Year Award, UB in 2015, Sigma Xi Junior Faculty Research Excellence Award, IIT in 2012, US National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2011, the Best Paper Awards of IEEE ICDCS'17, ACM/IEEE IWQoS'17, IEEE ICNP'11, and two others. His research has been supported by multiple federal research grants including eight awards from US National Science Foundation and two grants from Department of Energy. He has been serving as the TPC co-chairs for many IEEE and ACM conferences. He serves/has served as associate editors for IEEE Transactions on Service Computing, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Wireless Communications, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, Oxford The Computer Journal, and Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing. He was elevated to an IEEE Fellow in 2015 at the age of 37 (one of the quickest in IEEE history, within eight years after Ph.D). He is a member of IEEE CS Fellows Evaluation Committee 2016. He has been an IEEE VTS Distinguished Lecturer since 2014. He was also a board member of Internet Privacy Task Force, IL, appointed by then-governor Pat Quinn in 2011. He is a member of ACM.

Research Interest

Computer Networks and Distributed Systems ,Computer Security and Information Assurance