Research Impact is a series that pulls back the curtain of IU Research, showcasing the faculty creating, innovating and advancing knowledge that improves communities and changes lives.
Sagar Samtani Photo courtesy of the IU Kelley School of Business
Addressing society's most critical challenges often requires interdisciplinary collaboration, something that Indiana University's Sagar Samtani has made central to his research. Working with students and faculty collaborators from across the IU Bloomington campus, he focuses his research on building AI techniques to address issues in cybersecurity, mental health analytics and business intelligence.
Samtani is an associate professor and Weimer Faculty Fellow in the IU Kelley School of Business. He leads Kelley's Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that develops practical data science and AI-enabled analytics methods and systems for societally relevant applications.
Question: What is the focus of your research?
Answer: My lab collects data around three specific problem areas - cybersecurity, mental health and business intelligence - and then we adapt or develop new AI techniques to process that data to solve a particular task.
At the organization level, we help firms around the world identify certain strategies they may face in their cybersecurity technology implementations and in their business intelligence context. We are helping them more effectively process external data relating to customers, their competitors and so on so they can make sound investment decisions, better facilitate strategic priorities, increase competitive advantage and more.
At the individual level, we are developing techniques to analyze sensor signal data generated from smart phones to identify when individuals are expressing depressive or anxious behavior. We can then offer AI-enabled solutions to address those concerns.
Q: How did you get involved in this area?
A: My original research stream, starting as a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, was in the context of AI for cybersecurity applications. I focused on identifying emerging threats and key hackers from online social media platforms to help improve cyberdefenses. More recently, I have looked at flaws and vulnerabilities that exist within different types of technologies to help organizations more effectively prioritize their security strategy and improve their security posture.
Focusing on mental health is a newer expansion of my research. As I engaged with many cybersecurity entities within organizations that were focused on prioritizing cyber as part of their organization strategy, I noticed a lot of those employees often had a lot of mental health concerns that stemmed from being overworked, doing night shifts, constantly being reactive to the types of threats they face and more. That led me to interact with several individuals on campus, specifically Bernice Pescosolido and Edlin Garcia Colato, so that we could build out that stream of research.
Q: What role do students play in your research?
A: Working with students is my favorite part of the job. At any given time, my lab has around 25 to 30 doctoral, master's and undergraduate students from various disciplines, including informatics, finance, information systems and more.
Ph.D. students primarily lead research groups. They are the core engine of the lab and produce some of the most advanced research. Master's students are gaining hands-on experiences developing systems and AI models that will help facilitate their interest in industry. Undergraduate students are whetting their appetite for research and doing AI-enabled analytics work, whether that be for industry or graduate school.
A lot of AI research today is focused on core model development or general purpose applications. We are training students to be very problem-focused and data-driven so they can think about how AI can help different sets of real-world, practical problems. That is a key element for the work we are trying to do and why I find it so important to train students in these areas.
Q: How is IU a leader in this area?
A: IU is a leader in both cybersecurity and mental health research. We have great operational cybersecurity entities on campus, including OmniSOC and the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, that give us a tremendous advantage when going after different types of publications of collaborative opportunities. It is a researcher's dream to be able to do cybersecurity research here at Indiana University.
With mental health, IU has stellar operational capabilities, including the Irsay Institute, and also phenomenal faculty that make these types of collaborations a lot easier.
Q: What advice do you have for someone entering the field?
A: It is important to get hands-on with cybersecurity. Taking courses is one element of it, but getting practical experiences through internships and different research opportunities is important as well. Cybersecurity is a hands-on team sport, so getting involved in that early is important.
