Ernesto Damiani joined Khalifa as Director of the Information Security Center. He is on extended leave from the Department of Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, where he leads the SESAR research lab. Ernesto's research interests include secure service-oriented architectures, privacy-preserving Big Data analytics and Cyber-Physical Systems security. Ernesto has held visiting positions at many international institutions, including George Mason University, US; Tokyo Denki University, Japan; LaTrobe University, Australia; and the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) at Lyon, France. He has been Principal Investigator many large-scale research projects funded by the European Commission, the Italian Ministry of Research and by private companies such as British Telecom; Cisco Systems; SAP; Telecom Italia; Siemens Networks (now Nokia Siemens) and others. In 2008, Ernesto was nominated ACM Distinguished Scientist and received the Chester Sall Award from the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. In 2016 he received the Services Society Stephen Yau Award. Ernesto has co-authored over 400 scientific papers and many books.