Ragib Hasan is a computer scientist and associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at Alabama at Birmingham where he leads the SECuRE and Trustworthy Computing Lab (SECRETLab). He is an NSF Career Award recipient in 2014 for his research on trustworthy cloud computing and has previously worked as an NSF Computing Innovation Fellow and Assistant Research Scientist at the Dept. of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University. He received his PhD in computer science in 2009 form the University of Illinois.
If all of that wasn’t enough, he is the founder of Shikkhok.com — a free education platform and a recipient of the 2013 Google RISE Award. He has worked extensively in adding information about Bangladesh to the English Wikipedia and has also started the Bangla Wikipedia movement.
In this wide-ranging conversation, we go all over the place and talk about the nitty gritty of security, how information is the new currency, picking research topics, digital forensic, history and what to do when feeling unfocused or overwhelmed.