About

Hi. My name is Sanjay Goel and I’m an Associate Professor in the Information Technology Management Department of the School of Business at the University at Albany State University of New York – try saying that 10 times fast! I’m also the Director of Research at the NYS Center for Information Forensics and Assurance at the University.

Previously, I worked at GE Global Research for 6 years where I brought good things to life in the form of aircraft turbine designs that have been implemented in many of the commercial aircraft flying today (my imagination was definitely at work). Jumping from engineering to the information security and teaching was like moving from one continent to another – but I’ve done that too, so it is just another incredible experience and challenge!

I am a proud graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at New Delhi. I was absolutely against doing a masters or a Ph.D, leaving my home in India, and becoming a teacher. I don’t know what happened, but I ended up in the U.S. and completed a masters degree from Rutgers and then a doctoral degree at RPI while I was at GE. As soon as I was done, I wanted to dump the corporate lifestyle and jumped into academia. That’s how I ended up at UAlbany.

Since I was expected to do research, I thought I might as well do it in something interesting. I really wanted to be a hacker, but ended up helping fight against them (the bad ones anyway). In information security (and information technology in general) everything changes so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with what is going on. I wanted to create a blog where I could express my thoughts about what’s happening near the tip of the iceberg and occasionally give a glimpse of what’s teeming in the deep dark depths of our cyber oceans. I am also keenly interested in complex systems and self-organization. I believe that as systems become more complex the solutions will come from self-organization. I interested in natural systems that exhibit self-organization and abstracting these systems for solving communication and security problems.

Feel free to send me news in the area of information security and self-organization and discuss/comment on my posts. Information security requires a lot of collaboration and cooperation, so I look forward to hearing from you.

– Sanjay