About Me

I’m a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. Until June 2023, I was at University College London (UCL), where I served as Director of the Academic Center of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR) and Head of the Information Security Research Group (ISRG).

In September 2023, I founded the Security and Privacy Advanced research Lab (SPALab), a research group with members from both UCR and UCL. I have a PhD from UC Irvine, advised by Gene Tsudik. During my PhD, I spent a few months on research internships at NEC in Heidelberg (2008), INRIA Rhone-Alpes (2009), and Nokia in Lausanne (2010). After graduating, I worked as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC from 2011 to 2013.

Please note that I am not looking to recruit any new students (interns, MS, PhD, etc.) until September 2026 at the earliest. I apologize in advance if I do not reply to inquiries about open positions.

Research

I am generally interested in impactful research in the broad Information Security field. Over the past few years, I have been focusing on trustworthy machine learning and socio-technical issues on the Web.

My research has been published at top-tier conferences in security (IEEE S&P, NDSS, ACM CCS, Usenix Security) and other fields, e.g., ICML, NeurIPS, WWW, ACM IMC, ACM SIGMETRICS, ICWSM, CSCW, etc. My co-authors and I have received best/distinguished paper awards from NDSS, ACM CCS, CSCW, ICWSM, ACM WebSci, and ACM IMC, the Data Protection by Design Award from the Catalan Data Protection authority, and were runners-up for the CSAW Applied Research Competition and the INRIA-CNIL Privacy Protection Award. As a final piece of useless information – I achieved the top-4 security “grand slam” in 2022 and 2024.

Education

• PhD in Networked Systems, Sep 2011
  University of California, Irvine
  Dissertation: Sharing Sensitive Information with Privacy
• BSc in Computer Science, Jul 2005
  University of Salerno, Italy
  Summa cum Laude, top 1% in graduating class

Personal

I was born in Avellino, a small town in South of Italy surrounded by the mountains of the Irpinia region. Irpinia is known for its green landscapes and medieval castles, the once-glorious soccer team, hazelnuts and black truffles, as well as some great wines like Taurasi, Fiano di Avellino, and Greco di Tufo.

In my free time, I like acting as a coffee snob and a guerilla activist against pineapple on pizza, nostalgically reminiscing about surfing in San Onofre, and cooking (only pasta and pizza, obviously).

I have always loved languages and I’m (kinda) fluent in English, French, and Italian, and can utter enough words to get into trouble in German, Spanish, and Persian.

Kind request: my name is ‘Emiliano’ (first name) + ‘De Cristofaro’ (last name). ‘De’ is not a middle name, so please-please-please don’t call me Mr/Dr/Prof. Cristofaro – it’d be like calling Robert De Niro ‘Robert Niro’ (you talking to me???).