Dr. Justin Zhan, professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University, spoke at the White House Big Data Workshop on Friday, May 3, at the White House Conference Center in Washington, D.C. Zhan joined researchers from Harvard University, UNC-Chapel Hill, Carnegie Mellon and other universities across the country.

Zhan is the director of ILAB. His research interests include Big Data, Information Assurance, Social Computing, and Health Science. He is a steering chair of ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), ASE/IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT), and ASE/IEEE International Conference on BioMedical Computing (BioMedCom). He currently serves as editor-in-chief of International Journal of Privacy, Security and Integrity, International Journal of Social Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems, and managing editor of SCIENCE Journal and HUMAN Journal.

Zhan’s topic was "Big Data and Cyber Security" as it relates to recent research conducted at ILAB. According to Zhan, Big Data has posed many novel security threats. Zhan discussed strategies on best practices for handling the challenges.