James Joshi

James Joshi is a professor of School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, and the founding director of the Laboratory of Education and Research on Security Assured Information Systems (LERSAIS). From September 2019 to August, 2023, he served as a Program Director in the Computer and Network System (CNS) division and its Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program at the U.S. National Science Foundation. He served as an “Expert” PD in the NSF Directorate of Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) from September, 2023 to February, 2025. He also served as the Co-Chair of the Privacy Interagency Working Group of the Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD), as well as the NITRD Fast Track Action Committees for: (1) Advancing Privacy Preserving Data Sharing and Analytics (PPDSA) that produced the National Strategy to Advance PPDSA in 2023; and (2) Digital Assets R&D Agenda that was responsible for publishing the National Objectives for Digital Assets R&D in 2023. He also served in the NITRD Task Force to write the Federal Cybersecurity R&D Strategy published in 2023 and the National Privacy Research Strategy published in 2024. He received his PhD in ECE and MS in CS from Purdue University in 2003 and 1998, respectively.

His research is focused broadly on cybersecurity and privacy areas including advanced access control models, security and privacy of distributed systems and AI/ML, and trust management. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2006. He had established LERSAIS/Pitt as an NSA designated Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (both CAE Education, and CAE Research). He has served as a program co-chair and/or general co-chair of several international conferences/workshop. He has published over 150 articles as book chapters and papers in journals, conferences and workshops, and has served as a special issue editor of several journals including IEEE TSC, Elsevier Computer & Security, ACM TOPS, Springer MONET, IJCIS, and Information Systems Frontiers. His research has been supported by NSF, NSA/DoD, and Cisco. He is an IEEE Fellow, an AAAS Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member, Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association, and an IEEE CS Golden Core member. He currently also serves as a member of the Council Executive Committee of the AAAS.

He currently serves as the Chair of the IEEE CS Transactions Operations Committee. He also serves as the founding Steering Committee chair of the following co-located International IEEE conferences: Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC); Trust, Privacy and Security of Intelligent Systems, and Applications (TPS); and Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogMI). He had served as the Editor-In-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing from 2017-2021. He established the first undergraduate degree program in Computer Science and Engineering in Nepal in 1993/94 while he was a faculty member at the then newly established Kathmandu University.