Draft:Nadya Bliss

Nadya Bliss

About

Dr. Nadya T. Bliss is a computer scientist with more than two decades experience in research and engineering for national security and defense. She is the executive and founding director of the Global Security Initiative (GSI), a pan-university organization focused on advancing research and education in support of national and global security at Arizona State University.  Bliss holds a professor of practice appointment (and is a member of Graduate Faculty) in the ASU School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, and is a Senior Global Futures Scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.

Dr. Bliss has more than 90 publications to her credit, holds two patents, and is a sought-after invited speaker around topics related to technology development, national security, and interdisciplinary research. She has appeared on PBS and NPR, and in the Christian Science Monitor, Axios, and CyberScoop.

Effective 2022, Bliss was appointed chair of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Science and Technology study group (DARPA ISAT), and vice-chair of the Computing Community Consortium. She also serves on the National Academies’ Cyber Resilience Forum, the National Academies’ Climate Security Roundtable and the National Academies’ ad-hoc committee examining defense-related STEM activities at minority institutions. Bliss is also member of the National Academies’ Committee on Transformative Science and Technology for the Department of Defense and the National Academies’ Panel on Assessment of the Network, Cyber, and Computational Sciences at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL).

Career

Dr. Bliss received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University, and earned her doctorate in Applied Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences (Complex Adaptive Systems Science) from Arizona State University.

Bliss began her career at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, spending a decade in various positions and most recently as the founding Group Leader of the Computing and Analytics Group. In that role, she oversaw all of the laboratory’s high-performance computing, along with a portfolio of programs focused on advanced analytics and computer architectures for Department of Defense and Intelligence Community mission needs.

In 2012, Bliss joined Arizona State University as technical director for both the Security and Defense Systems Initiative (SDSI) and of ASURE, an applied research and development lab component of ASU's Public Enterprise. As technical director, Bliss led the technical and programmatic strategy by identifying academic capabilities for Department of Defense and Intelligence Community needs.

In 2015, Bliss founded the Global Security Initiative (GSI) at ASU and served as its inaugural director. GSI serves as ASU’s primary interface with the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Intelligence Community. Bliss became executive director of GSI in 2019.

Honors and Awards

In 2010, she received the inaugural MIT Lincoln Laboratory Early Career Technical Achievement award for work in parallel computing, computer architectures, and graph processing algorithms and her leadership in anomaly detection in graph-based data.

She is also the recipient of the R&D100 award for her work on PVTOL: Parallel Vector Tile Optimizing Library.

Research and Publications

“A Research Ecosystem for Secure Computing”, Authors: Nadya Bliss (Arizona State University), Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University), Suresh Venkatasubramanian (University of Utah), and Fred Schneider (Cornell University)

“An Agenda for Disinformation Research”, Authors: Nadya Bliss (Arizona State University), Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado, Boulder), Joshua Garland (Santa Fe Institute), Filippo Menczer (Indiana University), Scott Ruston (Arizona State University), Kate Starbird (University of Washington), Chris Wiggins (Columbia University)

B. A. Miller, P. J. Wolfe, M. S. Beard, N. T. Bliss, “A Spectral Framework for Anomalous Subgraph Detection,” IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 63, Issue: 16), 2015.

B. Miller, N. Arcolano, N. Bliss, “Efficient Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Attributed Graphs”, IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics, June 2013.

E. Robinson, N. Bliss, S. Mohindra, “Parallel Mapping of Sparse Computations”, Book Chapter in Graph Algorithms in the Language of Linear Algebra, J. Kepner, J. Gilbert (Editors), SIAM 2011.

J. Kepner, D. Bader, R. Bond, N. Bliss, C. Faloutsos, B. Hendrickson, J. Gilbert, E. Robinson, “Fundamental Questions in Analysis of Large Graphs”, Book Chapter in Graph Algorithms in the Language of Linear Algebra, J. Kepner, J. Gilbert (Editors), SIAM 2011.

B. A. Miller, M. S. Beard, and N. T. Bliss, “Eigenspace analysis for threat detection in social networks”, in Int. Conf. Inform. Fusion, pp. 1–7, 2011.

B. Miller, N. T. Bliss, P. J. Wolfe, “Subgraph Detection Using Eigenvector L1 Norms”, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference Proceedings, Dec 2010.

G. Hendry, E. Robinson, V. Gleyzer, J. Chen, L. Carloni, N. T. Bliss, K. Bergman, “Circuit-Switched Memory Access in Photonic Networks-on-Chip for High Performance Embedded Computing”, Proceedings of ACM/IEEE Supercomputing, Nov 2010.

N. T. Bliss, J. Kepner, “pMatlab Parallel Matlab Library”, Special Issue on High-Productivity Programming Languages and Models, International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Volume 21 Number 3, Fall 2007.