FI graduate uses Ph.D. research in social informatics for cybersecurity projects in the U.S.

Author: Klára Petrovičová for fi.muni.cz

One Erasmus stay can change your life. Michael Tsikerdekis experienced this when he went to the Czech Republic for an Erasmus and eventually decided to pursue his PhD there with research in social informatics. Michael went to the US after his doctoral studies as a professor, and has lived there ever since. In the interview for FI MU, he told us more about his journey, beginnings in the Czech Republic and exciting projects he’s working on.

Can you tell me something about your journey before joining FI?

That was back in 2006. I was in Greece, and I was doing my undergraduate and one day my friends came to me and asked me, “Would you like to go for Erasmus?” And I said, sure, where are we going? And they said the Czech Republic. So I thought cool I've never been there, so it would be fun to try it out.

I prepared ahead of time and started learning Czech to the point where I could have some decent conversations. I came to Mendel University for six months. After Erasmus, I started looking for PhD programs. Because I enjoyed my stay in the Czech Republic, I decided to go there for my PhD—this time to the Faculty of informatics at Masaryk university. The most exciting field from the faculty’s pages for me at that time was social informatics with professor Zlatuška. I came to the Czech Republic a bit ahead of the fall semester, so I started a job at IBM in the meantime and then pursued my PhD.

What was your PhD research about?

My research at the university was in social informatics. I was primarily interested in how the design would affect people's online behaviour. Ten years ago, this type of research was a novelty. This might be much more obvious nowadays, but seeing how design could influence behavior was very interesting.

One of the most cited papers of mine was on Wikipedia, which lets you conduct research. I was interested to see how people behaved when they used real names, pseudonyms and being completely anonymous because those three options exist on Wikipedia. And what came out of it was that indeed, there was a difference in how people act pseudonymously versus anonymously and with real names. People didn't think about pseudo-names and being anonymous as a different thing, but because people attach personality traits to their nicknames, they tend to behave a bit differently than when they're completely anonymous. If anything, they were likely to be more expressive, aggressive, or assertive.

What was it like to study at FI MU in Brno as a foreigner?

Apart from the initial difficulties starting it was very different from Greece. In a good way, because there was a lot more organization. The system worked, which is very important for students with a lot of stress from studying. And of course, the language barrier was there from the beginning, but as I got better, it was much easier for me to communicate, find opportunities and meet other professors who helped me very much. For example, professor Hladká, professor Kopeček and my advisor Zlatuška were really there for me and provided me with opportunities to grow. I have spoken with people in other places that did their PhDs. And it’s not always a guarantee, you don't always get to have space to grow.

For a PhD there are certain things you must do to get experience, research is one, and teaching is the other. I'm happy I got both of them.

During the end of my studies, graduate student Tomáš Bouda from the Department of Information and Library Studies, which at the time, had a human-computer interaction program came to me and asked me to teach a class about my research in Czech. So I did, even though it must have been awful for the students due to my Czech language skills (laugh). But I taught in English as well for the Department of Sociology under the supervision of professor Jaworsky.

Can you tell me about your journey after graduating from FI MU?

During my time in the Czech Republic, I also met my wife, Anna, who's Czech-Canadian, she grew up in Canada, but both of her parents are Czech, and she’s a Czech citizen now. We were trying to figure out what we wanted to do at the time. And I told my parents I was going to get married, and they said, you finish your degree first. So I officially graduated on the 15th of January from Masaryk. And then we went to Canada and got married in February. In December 2012. I had an offer to work as a professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. I already had an offer before I graduated. That made it easy for my defence because if you have a job as a professor, the argument that your research is important is that somebody else found it interesting enough to give you a job.

Moving to the US was an interesting experience in many ways. Kentucky is a different part of the United States. There were a lot of students who, for example, stayed in the state. International travel for them was going to Ohio. And I came from the Czech Republic, where people travel all over different countries, and it takes them an hour to go abroad.

In my first year as a professor, I had my first child born, my daughter Violet, and after a few years, we decided that it would be nice to be somewhere near the sea. I grew up in Greece, so I missed the sea and the mountains because Kentucky, although charming, is flat. My son, Valerian, was born in 2017. And within a month, we flew with him to Washington State. And I’ve been here ever since at the Department of Computer Science at Western Washington University.

After I left Masaryk university, I found a collaborator in the field of Cybersecurity, Sherali Zeadally. Since I understood people’s behaviour online, we figured I could probably translate that to studying online deception and detection of attacks. Initially, I started at higher layers - with social media. But now I focus on networks, anomaly detection and similar problems. I teach in a cybersecurity program, so my courses are computer science networks and operating systems because all of those are related.

How would you compare Western Washington University and Masaryk University?

They are very similar. The only difference is that we don't have PhD students. The work I do is with undergraduates and Master's students. I wrote many papers with undergraduates, but it takes time and mentoring to involve them. At one point in time I had 12 students involved in my research lab.

We're also not as large as Masaryk University; the University has 15,000 students, and I would say it’s more connected thanks to that. This is very important for collaborations.

What is your current research topic?

My research primarily focuses on all forms of deception. So, for example, I’m trying to find anomaly detection for when an adversary attacks a network. And I also focus on online problems like fake news and misinformation. I almost wholly switched my research field to security, which was unexpected for me.

Looking back at your time at FI Masaryk, do you think it contributed to your career prospects?

Definitely! I gained a lot from it, and I didn’t even realise it back then. For example, when I was interviewing for the University of Hawaii at Manoa, they knew Masaryk because some people were doing research with people in Masaryk.

Where do you see yourself, career-wise, in five years?

I hope I’ll be working here because I enjoy it and have many future projects. One of the projects that I've been working on is PISCES. That's a project where we monitor a lot of municipalities using students. Some local municipalities here don't have a budget to secure their networks because that's expensive. So instead, PISCES, a nonprofit corporation, provides the intrusion detection system, and we have the data sent to the cluster at Western Washington University. Cybersecurity students that are interested in becoming security analysts, or at least exploring the idea, can take the course where they actively look through the data in those systems, and analyse them, some people build scripts in Python, and they try to do detection, whereas others use interfaces for visualisations.

And we have detected many things over the years, malware, ransomware, and Bitcoin mining. We operate like a security operation centre, for free, for municipalities that cannot afford it. I've been working on taking this project internationally, so I have been talking to Greece's Ministry of Digital Governance about that. And I'm hoping I can help expand the idea because there are alot of these small municipalities with critical infrastructure, like water treatment plants, that ran through the backbone of their networks. They are not secure and may have a firewall, but they still don't have proactive security in those places. So I think it's well worth trying to up their security.

I'm also writing a book on databases now. So that's another fun thing. And I’m still doing research and teaching courses. Pretty fun Professor life, I would say. (laugh)

What advice would you give our aspiring international students coming to FI Masaryk? Or someone who would like to pursue a PhD?

They should knock on professors' doors. Professors don’t go around to find you. I don’t even have time to do that. If you show genuine interest, they will assign you to a project, but you must search for opportunities. However, you have to be open to opportunities for all sorts of research because, especially at the PhD level, one cannot have their mind set in stone on what to do for the rest of their life. It's a time of exploration and exercise. And at the end of the day, even the dissertation we write is just a long exercise. It's not a document that will change the world. There will be more research papers that will be more impactful than the dissertation. So I think keeping an open mind for research and seeking opportunities to teach in English, especially for future professors, they must have teaching experience. It's extremely valuable and not something you can get through one or two lectures. You have to observe it with others and try it yourself several times. And also get some valuable feedback. That would be my main advice.