It's around midnight, and the graduate student preps for his night shift in the computer lab. It's the 1970s, and the IBM 1800 at the University of California, Berkeley is considered to be a revolutionary machine-6 feet tall, spanning the entire length of the wall. It's there, in the lab, where Virgil Gligor, oblivious of the time, spends hours experimenting with programming, designing, debugging, and working out complicated pattern recognitions.
By 1976, he is one of a few in the world to earn a PhD in computer protection and privacy issues. He imagines that the field, though small, might grow in demand as businesses adapt to computer technology. Good hunch.
Today, Gligor is co-director of Carnegie Mellon CyLab, a research and education center for computer and networks security and software assurance. He still reflects on those early days in the lab. He says he approached his experiments much like a never-ending puzzle. "I was intrigued."
The professor continues to work on computer security for the rest of us, protecting the public from malware, worms, and other bugs through his research. For his design and implementation of trustworthy computing systems, Gligor recently received the Outstanding Innovation Award for computer privacy and security expertise from the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. Gligor sees his role evolving: "New and exciting technologies are now-and always will be-vulnerable."
-Lisa Kay Davis (DC'09)
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