Faculty
Amit Seal Ami
Assistant Professor
ENB 343K
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Biography
Amit Seal Ami is an assistant professor in the USF Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing. He joined the college in 2025 and teaches undergraduate secure coding, a course that introduces students to best practices in defensive programming and helps them develop the critical mindset required to write robust, secure software. He expects to teach related computing courses in the future. Before beginning his academic career, he worked as a software engineer and IT consultant in industry, with service as a software engineer at IMS Dhaka, and an IT consultant at Southech Limited, and as a policy fellow for the Joint Commission on Technology and Science for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Research Interests
Ami鈥檚 research sits at the intersection of software engineering and cybersecurity,
with a focus on evaluating and improving the automated analysis techniques used to
detect vulnerabilities in software systems. His work has uncovered significant flaws
in the way static analysis tools are designed and deployed, showing that many tools
are optimized to reduce false positives, even when that approach results in missing
high-stakes vulnerabilities. Through his mutation-based evaluation frameworks, Ami
creates systematic ways to measure how well these tools live up to their security
claims, revealing when industry standards may be out of alignment with actual needs.
Ami is particularly interested in bridging the gap between the designers and users
of security analysis tools. His award-winning research has shown that the tools software
engineers in real-world environments need may have different features and resources
from what the tool designers assume. By focusing on that disconnect, his work aims
to make vulnerability detection more reliable, actionable, and aligned with real-world
software development practices.
Honors and Awards
His research has been presented at highly selective conferences such as IEEE Symposium
on Security & Privacy, the USENIX Security Symposium, the International Conference
on Software Engineering, and the European Software Engineering Conference/ ACM SIGSOFT
Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, among others.
Ami鈥檚 contributions have been recognized with multiple honors, including the Distinguished
Paper Award at the 2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), which was awarded
to top 0.6% of the submitted 1,463 papers, and the Coastal Virginia Center for Cyber
Innovation (COVA CCI) - Cybersecurity Dissertation Fellowship award in 2021.
In 2024, William & Mary honored him with its International Student Achievement Award
for his significant contribution to security and software engineering research and
service, citing his exemplary contributions to open-source software and strong track
record of serving his research community as a sub-reviewer for top-tier security and
software engineering conferences. The university also recognized him with its Stephen
K. Park Graduate Research Award in 2025.
Education
Ami received a PhD in Computer Science from William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He earned both a Master of Science in Software Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology from the University of Dhaka in Dhaka, Bangladesh.