Manos Antonakakis has been appointed to the Dean’s Professorship, effective June 1, 2020. 

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Manos Antonakakis has been appointed to the Dean’s Professorship, effective June 1, 2020.  This professorship resides in the College of Engineering Dean’s Office at Georgia Tech.

Antonakakis is an associate professor in Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is the co-director of the Center for Cyber Operations Enquiry and Unconventional Sensing (COEUS). He also leads the Astrolavos Lab, where his students conduct research in the areas of attack attribution, network security and privacy, intrusion detection, and data mining. 

During his tenure as a faculty member at Georgia Tech, Antonakakis has raised more than $53 million in research funding from government agencies and the private sector. In April 2018, he received the Georgia Tech Outstanding Achievement in Research Program Development Award for acquiring a $17.3 million award from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to establish the science of attack attribution. 

Antonakakis is the author of multiple U.S. patents in the areas of security and machine learning, and his Ph.D. thesis is considered the seminal work in Domain Name System (DNS) security and DNS-based statistical learning. It was the first Ph.D. thesis in the world to cover statistical learning in DNS security. 

Antonakakis' research group’s work has been publicized through news releases focused on faster detection and clean-up of network infections, monitoring of Internet of Things security, combosquatting, and analyzing network traffic to determine malware infection. Prior to joining the ECE faculty in 2013, he served as chief scientist at Damballa, where his research supported early threat detection and prevention tools. Antonakakis also worked for IBM/ISS and was a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology - U.S. Department of Commerce. 

Antonakakis currently serves as the co-chair of the Academic Committee for the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), and he was instrumental in helping Georgia Tech become the first university to join MAAWG in 2015.  Additionally, Antonakakis’ service to the DoD, intelligence community, and law enforcement organizations has been highly significant. In his most recent recognition, Antonakakis received the Certificate of Appreciation for service provided to the 2nd Cyber Protection Battalion of the U.S. Army at Fort Gordon, Georgia.