Balaji Palanisamy

Assistant Professor

School of Computing and Information

Department of Informatics & Networked Systems

135 N. Bellefield Avenue, Room 704

Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Email: bpalan@pitt(-dot--edu)

Phone: 412.624.0232

CV (July 2018)

 

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Information in University of Pittsburgh. My research broadly spans the areas of Distributed Systems and Data Privacy. At Pitt, I co-direct research in the Laboratory for Education and Research on Security Assured Information Systems (LERSAIS). Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh, I received my Ph. D. degree in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology.

PhD positions: We’re always looking for self-motivated and dedicated Ph.D students. If you are interested in joining our research group, please apply to our graduate program.

Research          Publications       Teaching            Students              Contact

RESEARCH:

My research interest lies in the areas of Data Privacy, Privacy-aware Computing, Distributed Computer Systems and Cloud Computing. I am especially interested in tackling problems related to scalable and privacy-conscious computing and data sharing in untrusted and outsourced computing environments.

Current Research

·      Location Privacy Protection Mechanisms

o   Protecting Multi-level Location Privacy [ReverseCloak]

o   Trajectory Privacy Protection for Points-of-interest Recommendation [DiffTrajectory]

o   Location-injection Attack Resilient Anonymization [kTrustee]

·      Privacy-aware Computing and Data sharing

o   Self-emerging Data Infrastructures [Emerge]

o   Privacy-preserving Mechanisms for Group Privacy [GroupDP]

o   Privacy-aware Auction Design for Dynamically Priced Clouds [PADS]

o   Privacy-aware Social Networking [SocialMix]

·      Resource Management Techniques for Cloud and Outsourced Computing

o   Contractual Relation-based Resource Allocation for Federated Clouds [ContractsCloud]

o   Utility-aware Resource Management for Edge Computing [Zenith]

Previous Projects

·      Data Privacy and Privacy-preserving Data Analytics

o   Protecting Location privacy with Road Network Mix-zones [MobiMix]

o   Anonymizing Continuous Queries of Mobile users [Delay-tolerant Mix-zones]

o   Privacy-preserving Publishing of Association Graphs [BiPartiteGraph-Privacy]

·      Large-scale Parallel Data Processing in the Cloud

o   Coupled Storage Architecture for MapReduce [Purlieus]

o   Cost-optimized Resource Allocation for MapReduce Clouds [Cura]

o   Seamless Caching for Bridging Compute and Storage Clouds [VNCache]

          

TEACHING:

· INFSCI 2750 –Cloud Computing (Spring 2016, Spring 2017)

· INFSCI 2955 – Special topics Systems - Cloud Computing (Spring 2015)

· INFSCI 1074 – Computer Security (Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016)

· INFSCI 2150 – Information Security & Privacy (Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2017, Fall 2017)

PhD STUDENTS:

· Chao Li  - Research focus: Self-emerging Data, Multi-level Data Disclosure and Location Privacy

· Jinlai Xu  - Research focus:  Edge and Cloud Computing, Privacy-aware Computing

· Kuheli Sai  - Research focus: Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing

 

PUBLICATIONS:

COPYRIGHT: The following materials are copyrighted by the corresponding publishers (e.g. ACM, IEEE, Springer Verlag). You should download them only if you accept and obey the terms and restrictions defined by the respective publishers, including the use of the downloaded materials only for personal or educational purpose.

JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS:

· Privacy in Internet of Things: from Principles to Technologies

  Chao Li and Balaji Palanisamy

  IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IEEE IoT-J 2018)

 

· k-Trustee: Location injection attack-resilient anonymization for location privacy

  Lei Jin, Chao Li, Balaji Palanisamy and James Joshi

  Elsevier Computers & Security (Computers & Security 2018)

 

· Optimized Contract-based Model for Resource Allocation in Federated Geo-distributed Clouds

  Jinlai Xu and Balaji Palanisamy

  IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (IEEE TSC 2018)

 

· Privacy-preserving Publishing of Multi-level Utility Controlled Graph Datasets

  Balaji Palanisamy, Ling Liu, Yang Zhou and Qingyang Wang

  ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (ACM TOIT 2018)

 

· G-SIR: An Insider Attack Resilient Geo-Social Access Control Framework

   Nathalie Baracaldo, Balaji Palanisamy, James Joshi

   IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC 2017)

 

· Distributed Algorithms for Spatial Retrieval Queries in Geospatial Analysis

   Qiulei Guo, Balaji Palanisamy, Hassan A. Karimi and Liming Zhang

   Services Transactions on Cloud Computing (STCC 2016).

 

· Road Network-Aware Spatial Alarms

   Kisung Lee, Ling Liu, Balaji Palanisamy and Emre Yigitoglu

   IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (IEEE TMC 2016)

 

· Attack-resilient Mix-zones over Road Networks: Architecture and Algorithms

   Balaji Palanisamy and Ling Liu

   IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (IEEE TMC 2015)

 

· Cost-effective Resource Provisioning for MapReduce in a Cloud

   Balaji Palanisamy, Aameek Singh and Ling Liu

   IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE TPDS 2015)

 

· Anonymizing Continuous Queries with Delay-tolerant Mix-zones on Road Networks

   Balaji Palanisamy, Ling Liu, Kisung Lee, Shicong Meng, Yuzhe Tang and Yang Zhou,

   Distributed and Parallel Databases (DAPD 2014)

 

· Effective Mix-zone Anonymization for Mobile Travelers

   Balaji Palanisamy and Ling Liu

   Geoinformatica 2014.

CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS:

·  Decentralized Release of Self-emerging Data using Smart Contracts

    Chao Li and Balaji Palanisamy

    Proc. of 37th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems. (IEEE SRDS 2018)

 

·  Reversible Data Perturbation Techniques for Multi-level Privacy-preserving Data Publication

    Chao Li, Balaji Palanisamy and Prashant Krishnamurthy

    Proc. of 2018 International Congress on Big Data. (BigData Congress 2018)

   Received Best Paper Award

 

·  QueryGuard: Privacy-preserving Latency-aware Query Optimization for Edge Computing

    Runhua Xu, Balaji Palanisamy and James Joshi

    Proc. of he 17th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications. (IEEE TrustCom-18)

 

·  Secure and Efficient Multi-Party Directory Publication for Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing

    K. Areekijseree, Yuzhe Tang, Ju Chen, Shuang Wang, Arun Iyengar and Balaji Palanisamy

    Proc. of 14th EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. (SecureComm 2018)

 

·  Group Privacy-aware Disclosure of Association Graph Data

    Balaji Palanisamy, Chao Li and Prashant Krishnamurthy

    Proc. of 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Boston, USA. (IEEE BigData 2017)

 

·  PADS: Privacy-preserving Auction Design for Allocating Dynamically Priced Cloud Resources

    Jinlai Xu, Balaji Palanisamy, Yuzhe Tang, S.D. Madhu Kumar

    Proc. of 3rd International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing, San Jose, USA. (IEEE CIC 2017)

 

· Emerge: Self-emerging Data Release using Cloud Data Storage

   Chao Li and Balaji Palanisamy

   Proc. of 10th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, Honolulu, USA. (IEEE CLOUD 2017)

 

· Cost-aware Resource Management for Federated Clouds using Resource Sharing Contracts

   Jinlai Xu and Balaji Palanisamy

   Proc. of 10th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, Honolulu, USA. (IEEE CLOUD 2017)

 

· Zenith: Utility-aware Resource Allocation for Edge Computing

   Jinlai Xu and Balaji Palanisamy, Heiko Ludwig, and Qingyang Wang 

   Proc. of 1st IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing, Honolulu, USA. (IEEE EDGE 2017)

 

· Differentially Private Trajectory Analysis for Points-of-Interest Recommendation

   Chao Li, Balaji Palanisamy and James Joshi 

   Proc. of 6th IEEE International Congress on Big Data , Honolulu, USA. (IEEE BigData Congress 2017)

   Received Best Paper Award

 

· Timed-release of Self-emerging Data using Distributed Hash Tables

  Chao Li and Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. of 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Atlanta, USA. (ICDCS 2017)

 

· DCM: Dynamic Concurrency Management for Scaling n-Tier Applications in Cloud

  Hui Chen, Qingyang Wang, Balaji Palanisamy, and Pengcheng Xiong

  Proc. of the 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Atlanta, GA, USA. (ICDCS 2017)

 

· ReverseCloak: A Reversible Multi-level Location Privacy Protection System (System Demonstration)

  Chao Li, Balaji Palanisamy, Aravind Kalaivanan and Sriram Raghunathan

  Proc. of 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Atlanta, USA. (ICDCS 2017)

 

· Group Differential Privacy-preserving Disclosure of Multi-level Association Graphs (poster)

  Balaji Palanisamy, Chao Li and Prashant Krishnamurthy

  Proc. of 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Atlanta, USA. (ICDCS 2017)

 

· SocialMix: Privacy-aware Communication in Online Social Networks

  Chao Li, Balaji Palanisamy and James Joshi

  Proc. of 23rd IEEE International Conference on Web Services, San Francisco, USA. (ICWS ’16) 

 

· ReverseCloak: Protecting Multi-level Location Privacy over Road Networks

  Chao Li and Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. of 24th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Melbourne, Australia. (CIKM ’15)

 

· De-anonymizable Location Cloaking for Privacy-controlled Mobile Systems

  Chao Li and Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. of 9th International Conference on Network and System Security, New York, USA (NSS 2015)

 

· A Distributed Polygon Retrieval Algorithm using MapReduce

  Qiulei Quo, Balaji Palanisamy and Hassan Karimi

  Proc. of International Symposium on Spatio-temporal Computing, Fairfax, Virginia, USA (ISSC 2015)

 

· Privacy-preserving Data Publishing in the Cloud: A Multi-level Utility Controlled Approach

  Balaji Palanisamy and Ling Liu

  Proc. of 8th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, New York, USA. (IEEE CLOUD 2015)

 

· A MapReduce Algorithm for Polygon Retrieval in Geospatial Analysis

  Qiulei Quo,  Balaji Palanisamy and Hassan Karimi

  Proc. of 8th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, New York, USA. (IEEE CLOUD 2015)

 

· Clustering Service Networks with  Entity, Attribute and Link Heterogeneity

  Yang Zhou, Ling Liu, Xianqiang Bao, Kisung Lee, Calton Pu, Balaji Palanisamy, Emre Yigitoglu, Qi Zhang

  Proc. of  22nd IEEE International Conference on Web Services, New York, USA. (IEEE ICWS 2015)

 

· Lightweight Indexing for Log-Structured Key-Value Stores

  Yuzhe Tang, Arun Iyengar, Wei Tan, Liana Fong, Ling Liu and Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. of 15th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (IEEE/ACM CCGrid 2015)

              Received Best Paper Award 

  Part of this work has been included in IBM InfoSphere BigInsights

 

· A Distributed Polygon Retrieval Algorithm using MapReduce (Poster)

  Qiulei Quo,  Balaji Palanisamy and Hassan Karimi

  Proc. of 10th IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing, Miami, Florida, USA (Collaboratecom 2014)

 

· LEAF: A Privacy-conscious Social Network-based Intervention Tool for IPV Survivors

  Balaji Palanisamy,  Sheldon Sensenig, James Joshi and Rose Constantino

  Proc. of 15th IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, San Franscisco, USA (IRI 2014)  

 

· Compromising Cloaking-based Location Privacy Preserving Mechanisms with Location Injection Attacks (Poster)

  Lei Jin,  Balaji Palanisamy and James Joshi

  Proc. of 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA  (CCS 2014)

 

· Geo-Social-RBAC: A Location-based Socially Aware Access Control Framework

   Nathalie Baracaldo, Balaji Palanisamy and James Joshi

   Proc. of 8th International Conference on Network and System Security, Xi’an, China (NSS 2014)

 

· VNCache: Map Reduce Analysis for Cloud-archived Data

  Balaji Palanisamy, Aameek Singh, Nagapramod Mandagere, Gabriel Alatore and Ling Liu

  Proc. of 14th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, Chicago, USA (IEEE/ACM CCGrid 2014)

 

· Cura: A Cost-Optimized Model for MapReduce in a Cloud

  Balaji Palanisamy, Aameek Singh, Ling Liu and Bryan Langston

  Proc. of 27th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2013)

 

· Road Network Mix-zones for Anonymous Location Based Services (System Demonstration)

  Balaji Palanisamy, Sindhuja Ravichandran, Ling Liu, Binh Han and Kisung Lee

  Proc. of 28th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2013)

 

· ROADALARM: a Spatial Alarm System on Road Networks (System Demonstration)

  Kisung Lee, Ling Liu, Binh Han, Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. of 28th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2013)

 

· Location Privacy with Road Network Mix-zones

  Balaji Palanisamy, Ling Liu, Kisung Lee, Aameek Singh and Yuzhe Tang

  Proc. of 8th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (IEEE MSN 2012)

 

· Reliable State Monitoring with Messaging Quality Awareness

  Shicong Meng, Arun Iyengar, Isabelle Rouvellou, Ling Liu, Kisung Lee, Balaji Palanisamy and Yuzhe Tang

  Proc. of 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (IEEE CLOUD 2012)

  Received Best Paper Award 

 

· Road Network Aware Spatial Alarm Processing

  Kisung Lee, Ling Liu, Shicong Meng, Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. of 19th IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2012)

 

· MobiMix: Protecting Location Privacy with Mix-zones over Road Networks

  Balaji Palanisamy and Ling Liu

  Proc. of 27th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2011)

 

· Purlieus: Locality-aware Resource Allocation for MapReduce in a Cloud

  Balaji Palanisamy, Aameek Singh, Ling Liu and Bhushan Jain

  Proc. of IEEE/ACM Supercomputing (SC 2011)

 

· Privacy Preserving Indexing for eHealth Information Networks

  Yuzhe Tang, Ting Wang, Ling Liu, Shicong Meng, Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. of 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2011)

 

· MedVault: Health Professional Access to Source-Verifiable Patient-Centric PHR Repository (Poster)

  Mustaque Ahamad, Douglas Blough, Ling Liu, David Bauer, Apurva Mohan, Daisuke Mashima, Bhuvan Bamba, Balaji Palanisamy, Ramkumar Krishnan, Italo Dacosta, and Ketan Kalgaonkar

  Poster presentation at the 19th Usenix Security Symposium, (USENIX Security 2010)

 

· Dynamic Routing of Reliability-Differentiated Connections in Optical Burst Switched Networks

  N.Sreenath, N. Devendra and Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. Managing Complexity in a Distributed World, IISc Centenary Conference, (MCDES 2008)

 

· Traffic Adaptive Wavelength Routing in IP-Over-WDM Networks

  Balaji Palanisamy, T.Siva Prasad, and N.Sreenath

  Proc. 14th International conference on Advanced Computing and Communications, (ADCOM 2006)

  Received Best Paper Award 

 

· An Online Distributed Protocol for the Restoration of Connectivity in the Virtual topology after Link failure in IP over WDM networks

   N.Sreenath and Balaji Palanisamy

   Proc. International conference on Networking and Services, Santa Clara, USA (ICNS 2006)

 

· Grooming of Multicast Sessions in Sparse Splitting WDM Mesh Networks using Virtual Source Based Trees

   N.Sreenath, Balaji Palanisamy, and S.R.Nadarajan

   Proc. International Conference on Systems and Networks Communication, (ICSNC 2006)

 

· A Two-Phase Distributed Reconfiguration Algorithm for Node Failures in IP-Over-WDM Networks

  N.Sreenath and Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. International Conference on Systems and Networks Communication, (ICSNC 2006)

WORKSHOP PUBLICATIONS:

· A Dynamic Privacy Aware Access Control Model for Location Based Services

  Leila Karimi, Balaji Palanisamy, James Joshi

  Proc. of 1st International Workshop on Privacy in Collaborative & Social Computing, Pittsburgh, USA. (PiCSoC 2016)

 

· Link Analysis of Wikipedia Documents using MapReduce

  Hardik Vasa, Anirudh Vasudevan and Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. of 4th IEEE International Workshop on Data Integration and Mining, San Franscisco, USA (DIM 2015)

 

· LITSEEK: Public health literature search by metadata enhancement with External knowledge bases

  Priyanka Prabhu, Shamkant B. Navathe, Stephen Tyler, Venu Dasigi, Neha Narkhede, Balaji Palanisamy

  Proc. of the 3rd International Workshop on Data and Text Mining in Bioinformatics (DTMBIO 2009)

BOOK CHAPTERS:

· Protecting Privacy in Indoor Positioning Systems

  Balaji Palanisamy, James Joshi

  Indoor Wayfinding and Navigation, 2015.

TECHNICAL REPORTS:

· A Patient-centric, Attribute-based, Source-verifiable Framework for Health Record Sharing

  Apurva Mohan , David Bauer, Douglas M. Blough, Mustaque Ahamad, Bhuvan Bamba, Ramkumar Krishnan, Ling Liu, Daisuke Mashima, Balaji Palanisamy

  GIT CERCS Technical Report No. GIT-CERCS-09-11, 2009, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.

PATENTS:

 Locality-aware Resource Allocation for Cloud Computing

  Balaji Palanisamy and Aameek Singh

  United States Patent Application No. 13/481,614

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES:

· Journal Editorial Boards:  

o   Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, IEEE TSC

o   Associate Editor, International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, IJCIS

o   Editorial Review Board member, Services Transactions on Internet of Things, STIOT

· Journal Review:  

o   IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE TDSC

o   International Journal of Very Large Databases, VLDBJ

o   IEEE Transactions on Reliability

o   IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE TPDS

o   IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, IEEE TLT

o   World Wide Web Journal

o   Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, JPDC

o   ACM Transactions on Database Systems, ACM TODS

o   IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, IEEE TSC

o   Wireless Networks Journal

o   ACM Transactions on the Web, ACM TWEB

o   IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, IEEE TVT

o   Journal of Grid Computing

· Conference/Workshop Chair:

o   Program Committee Chair -- 18th and 19th IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, IRI 2017, IRI 2018

o   Demo/Poster chair - 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2017

o   Area Track Chair - Cloud as a Service - 9th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, IEEE CLOUD 2016

o   Area Track Chair - Security & Privacy track - 4th International Congress on Big Data, IEEE BigData Congress 2016

o   Short paper Track chair - 4th International Conference on Mobile Services, IEEE MS 2016

o   Workshop Chair - 1st and 2nd IEEE International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Technologies, IEEE CIC 2015 and IEEE CIC 2016

o   Best Paper Award Committee - 17th IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, IRI 2016

o   Publicity Chair – 16th  and 17th IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, IRI 2015 and IRI 2016

o   Publications Chair - 10th IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing, (Collaboratecom 2014)

o   Program Committee Chair - 3rd International Workshop on Collaborative Cloud (CollabCloud 2014), held in conjunction with Collaboratecom 2014

· Conference Program Committees:

o   35th, 36thand 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2015, ICDCS 2016, ICDCS 2017

o   24th. 25th and 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2015, CIKM 2016, CIKM 2017

o   5th and 6th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, CODASPY 2015, CODASPY 2016

o   7th, 8th, 9th and 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing, IEEE CLOUD 2014, IEEE CLOUD 2015, IEEE CLOUD 2016, IEEE CLOUD 2017

o   16th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, CCGrid 2016

o   15th International Conference on High Performance Computing, HiPC 2015

o   7th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, CloudCom 2015

o   20th International Conference for Database Systems for Advanced Applications,  DASFAA 2015

o   21th & 22nd International Conference on Web Services, ICWS 2014 , ICWS 2015

o   15th & 16th IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, IRI 2014, IRI 2015

·      IEEE Communications Society:

o   Chair, IEEE Communications Society, Pittsburgh Chapter, April 2014 - present

 

CONTACT

Balaji Palanisamy,

School of Information Sciences

University of Pittsburgh

135 N. Bellefield Avenue,

Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Email: bpalan@pitt(-dot--edu)

Phone: 412.624.0232