Dr. Joanna F. DeFranco is an associate professor of software engineering and a member of the graduate faculty at Penn State University. Before her academic career, she spent many years as a software engineer for government and industry. Notable engineering experiences during this period include traveling the world on Naval scientific ships working on ocean mapping software for the Naval Air Development Center (NADC) and developing software for cable headend devices at Motorola. She has published many journal articles and conference proceedings on software security, IoT, blockchain, and software engineering. She authored another book in this series on Cyber Security and Digital Forensics and has coauthored a book on project management. In addition to academia, Dr. DeFranco is currently a guest researcher for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Computing Fundamentals area editor for IEEE Computer, and the IoT column editor of IEEE Computer Magazine. As for her "scholarly" credentials, she earned a BS in electrical engineering and math from Penn State University, an MS in computer engineering from Villanova University, and a PhD in computer and information science from New Jersey Institute of Technology. Dr. Mohamad Kassab is an associate research professor of software engineering and a member of the graduate faculty at Penn State University. He earned his Ph.D. and MS degrees in software engineering from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Previously, Dr. Kassab has been a postdoctoral researcher at ETS School of Advanced Technology in Montreal and visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University. With over twenty years of global industry experience, he developed a broad spectrum of skills and responsibilities in software engineering and IoT. Notable experiences include business unit manager at Soramitsu, senior quality engineer at SAP, senior associate at Morgan Stanley, senior quality assurance specialist at NOKIA, and senior software developer at Positron Safety Systems. Dr. Kassab's research projects revolve around Software Engineering processes and disruptive technologies (e.g., IoT, blockchain, AI). He has published extensively in software engineering books, journals, and conference proceedings. He is also the organizer of many software engineering workshops and conference sessions.
