
Professor, Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Chair of Computing
Research Areas: Cybersecurity, Computer Architecture, Software Engineering
Biography
Richard DeMillo is a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy. He holds the Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Chair in Computing at Georgia Tech. He is is also Managing Director of Gtatrium™, LLC, a subsidiary of Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures. He was formerly the John P. Imlay Dean of Computing and Director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center.
Positions he held prior to joining Georgia Tech, include: Chief Technology Officer for Hewlett-Packard, Vice President of Computing Research for Bell Communications Research, Director of the Computer Research Division for the National Science Foundation, and Director of the Software Test and Evaluation Project for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He has also held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin, Purdue University and the University of Padua, Italy.
His research includes over 100 articles, books and patents in software and computer engineering, cryptography, cybersecurity, and theoretical computer science. In 1982, he wrote the first policy for testing software intensive systems for the US Department of Defense. DeMillo and his collaborators launched and developed the field of program mutation for software testing, which is today the standard technique for determining software test adequacy. He is a co-inventor of Differential Fault Cryptanalysis and holds the patent on applying DFA to break public key cryptosystems. His 1979 paper “Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs,” co-authored with Richard Lipton and Alan Perlis has been reprinted dozens of times and was recently cited as one of the 50 classic papers in the history of computer science.
He currently works in the area of election and voting system security. His work has been cited in court cases, including a 2019 Federal Court decision declaring unconstitutional the use of paperless voting machines. He has served as a foreign election observer for the Carter Center and is a member of the State of Michigan Election Security Commission.
He has served on boards of public and private cybersecurity and privacy companies, including RSA Security and SecureWorks. He has served on many non-profit and philanthropic boards including the Exploratorium and the Campus Community Partnership Foundation (formerly the Rosalind and Jimmy Carter Foundation). He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In 2010, he founded the Center for 21st Century Universities, Georgia Tech’s living laboratory for fundamental change in higher education. He served as Executive Director for ten years. He was named Lumina Foundation Fellow for his work in higher education. His book, Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities, (MIT Press, 2011) helped spark a national conversation about online education. A 2015 sequel, Revolution in Higher Education, also published by MIT Press, won the Best Education Book award from the American Association of Publishers. From 2015-2018, he co-chaired Georgia Tech’s Commission on Creating the Next in Education. The Commission’s report was released in 2018 and was awarded the awarded 2019 Achievement Award of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. He received the ANAK Society’s Outstanding Faculty Member Award in 2016 for his work in service to students.