Azqa Nadeem

[firstname].[lastname]@tudelft.nl


02.370, Building Echo, EEMCS,

Delft University of Technology,

The Netherlands

I am a Ph.D. candidate and Lecturer in the Cyber Analytics Lab (Cyber Security group) at Delft University of Technology, advised by Dr. Sicco Verwer and Dr. George Smaragdakis.

My research focus is on Explainable Machine Learning for Cyber Security. I truly believe that machine learning can provide more insights than just prediction probabilities. To this aim, I develop explainable sequential machine learning pipelines that extract actionable intelligence from large volumes of cyber data with the aim of assisting security analysts in their daily operations. These pipelines create human in the loop settings for AI-assisted humans.

Next to research, I spend 40% of my time developing and teaching Cyber Security lectures to BSc. (Computer Science and Engineering) students at TU Delft. The teaching material can be found under Cyber Security Lecture Series.

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


Recent news

02-2023 Our SoK paper on XAI for cybersecurity has been accepted at EuroS&P! :scroll:
02-2023 Serving as mentoring co-chair for the EuroS&P 2023. :school:
01-2023 Giving a talk about alert-driven attack graphs at the Digital Security group, Radboud University. :woman_teacher:
12-2022 Giving a talk about alert-driven attack graphs at Prof. Stoelinga’s group, University of Twente. :woman_teacher:
11-2022 Panelist for a webinar on MSc. scholarship opportunities in NL organized by the Pakistani embassy.

Selected publications

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. MAAIDL
    Beyond Labeling: Using Clustering to Build Network Behavioral Profiles of
    Malware Families
    Nadeem, Azqa, Hammerschmidt, Christian, Ganan, Carlos H, and Verwer, Sicco
    In Malware Analysis Using Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, 2021
  5. CCS
    Enabling Visual Analytics via Alert-driven Attack Graphs
    Nadeem, Azqa, Verwer, Sicco, Moskal, Stephen, and Yang, Shanchieh J
    In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2021