Azqa Nadeem

a.[lastname]@utwente.nl


ZI 2027, Zilverling, Faculty EEMCS,

University of Twente, Enschede,

The Netherlands

I am an Assistant Professor at University of Twente in the Semantics, Cybersecurity, and Services (SCS) group. My research focuses on explainable machine learning solutions for cyber security tasks such as incident response, malware analysis, and intrusion detection. My mission is to go beyond prediction probabilities, and extract semantically meaningful insights from ML models (especially under unsupervised settings with complex structured data).

Before joining UT, I was a PhD candidate/lecturer at TU Delft. During my PhD, I developed several explainable sequential machine learning tool-chains for automating cyber threat intelligence. These tool-chains extracted actionable insights from large volumes of cyber data in order to assist security analysts in understanding adversary behavior.

Next to research, I also spent 40% of my time developing and teaching cyber security lectures to BSc. (Computer Science and Engineering) students at TU Delft. I wrote about my teaching experience here, and the teaching material can be found under Cyber Security Lecture Series.

Outside of work, I love photography, painting, and traveling. I enjoy discussions about human psychology, neurodivergence, cats, imposter syndrome, and… well… cats.


Recent news

09-2024 Presenting a keynote on XAI4Cyber at the ACCSS workshop on Security & Trustworthiness of AI! :woman_teacher:
09-2024 Giving a lecture on AI for security and privacy at SecAI summer school at KU Leuven! :woman_teacher:
07-2024 Giving an invited talk at the International Workshop on Safety-Security Interaction (SENSEI). :woman_teacher:
04-2024 Successfully defended my PhD! #PhDone :mortar_board: :muscle: :sparkles:
02-2024 Presenting our alert-driven attack graph demo at Orange CyberDefense in Utrecht. :woman_teacher:

Selected publications

  1. SIGCSE
    Cybersecurity as a Crosscutting Concept Across an Undergrad Computer
    Science Curriculum: An Experience Report
    Nadeem, Azqa
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2024
  2. EuroS&P
    SoK: Explainable Machine Learning for Computer Security Applications
    Nadeem, Azqa, Vos, Daniel, Cao, Clinton, Pajola, Luca, Dieck, Simon, Baumgartner, Robert, and Verwer, Sicco
    In IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P), 2023
  3. ECML
    SECLEDS: Sequence Clustering in Evolving Data Streams via Multiple Medoids
    and Medoid Voting
    Nadeem, Azqa, and Verwer, Sicco
    In Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD), 2022
  4. TDSC
    Alert-driven Attack Graph Generation using S-PDFA
    Nadeem, Azqa, Verwer, Sicco, Moskal, Stephen, and Yang, Shanchieh J
    In IEEE Transcations on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2021