Amir Houmansadr

Amir Houmansadr is an Associate Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on network and AI security, privacy-enhancing technologies, and censorship circumvention. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2012) and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin (2012-2014).

Key research areas include secure communication systems, adversarial ML attacks, federated learning defenses, and analyzing censorship mechanisms like the Great Firewall of China. He leads the SPIN research group, which develops tools like CensorLab and MassBrowser. Notable contributions include exposing GFW vulnerabilities and advancing privacy-preserving AI models.

Awards include the DARPA Director’s Award (2024), ACM CCS Distinguished Paper (2023), and NSF CAREER Award (2016). His work has been featured in media outlets like The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, and MassLive.

He advises over 20 students and has served on program committees for top security conferences (IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, USENIX Security). Current courses include CMPSCI 660: Advanced Information Assurance.