Meet our team

Sadia Afroz, PhD, is a security and privacy expert leading misinformation research at Avast. Before joining Avast, she was a postdoc at the University of California Berkeley and researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley. She also worked as a privacy consultant in several Bay Area startups. Her research focuses on anonymity, anti-censorship, and adversarial learning. One of her highly cited works is about detecting anonymous authors by analyzing their writing styles. She often gets emails from strangers asking to deanonymize Satoshi (the creator of Bitcoin). As an avid defender of privacy, she has to refuse such requests (also, because machine learning is very easy to fool). More about her work here.

Martin Bálek joined Avast in 2016 as a Research Director. In this role, he focuses on further developing Avast’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to advance Avast’s automated threat detection capabilities. Prior to joining Avast, Martin worked as a general Artificial Intelligence Researcher at GoodAI, and as a Software Developer at NCLab, where he worked in front-end and back-end development. Before his career in the software industry, he did academic research in theoretical computer science, mathematical aesthetics, and the modeling of biological cells for more than 11 years at Charles University in Prague. Martin also holds a Master’s degree in Abstract Mathematics from the Charles University in Prague.

Vaclav Belak is a Staff Scientist at the Avast AI Research Labs focusing on behavioral threat detection and analysis. His main research interests are graph mining and machine learning, dynamic graph analysis, and causal inference. Prior to the Avast AI Research Labs, he has worked as a Data Scientist in pharmaceutical research, a startup pioneering automated machine learning techniques, and as a postdoc at the Insight Institute for Data Analytics at NUI Galway, where he also completed his PhD in the area of dynamic graph analysis and mining with applications to social networks.

Fabrizio Biondi obtained his PhD at the IT University of Copenhagen in 2014, developing techniques for the computation of information leakage of systems modeled as Markovian processes. He served as a Maitre des Conferences at CentraleSupelec and Chair of Cybersecurity in Threat Analysis for Region Bretagne, before moving to Avast as an AI Research Manager. Fabrizio’s work focuses on developing and deploying machine learning solutions to automate security processes, detect and analyze malware, and detect vulnerabilities. As a co-founder of the MatesLab hackspace he is a free software advocate who has worked on honeypots, malware detection, distributed scanning (dnmap) keystroke dynamics, Bluetooth analysis, privacy protection, intruder detection, robotics, microphone detection with SDR (Salamandra) and biohacking. He received the USENIX WOOT Best Paper Award in 2017, and regularly presents and publishes research, and sits on the technical program committee of top-tier and well-known international conferences, including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS, USENIX Enigma, WWW, ACSAC, DIMVA, and RAID.

Branislav Bosansky has a long track record of research in algorithmic and computational game theory and applications of game-theoretic methods for security problems. He received his PhD at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, at the Czech Technical University in Prague in 2015. Afterwards, he spent 1 year as a postdoc researcher at the Aarhus University in Denmark and then rejoined Artificial Intelligence Center at the Czech Technical University in Prague. Branislav joined Avast in 2019 as a principal researcher with the aim of improving automated decisions based on game-theoretic reasoning. He is co-author of more than 35 papers at the top AI conferences and journals, and regularly participates as a member of program committees for top AI conferences (IJCAI, AAAI, AAMAS).

Hana is a voting member of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 (The C++ Programming Language Committee), where she represents the Czech Republic and chairs the Study Group for Compile-time and metaprogramming (SG7). In addition, she organized the release meeting of the C++ committee in Prague 2020. She presented at numerous conferences around the globe, where she talked mainly about the compile-time processing of regular expressions. One of the presentations was a keynote at the CppNow conference in Aspen. In Avast, she focuses on bringing new technologies and ideas to solve problems on a unique scale for our company. Her other focus is Diversity & Inclusivity effort to make World a bit nicer. Outside of work, she is a keen landscape photographer and hiker.

Karel Horák is a Senior Researcher at Avast. He obtained his PhD in computational game theory at the Czech Technical University in Prague. At Avast, he focuses mainly on machine learning models for handling hierarchical data (such as JSON files) to empower fully automated malware detection. Apart from that, he remains interested in theoretical and algorithmic aspects of solving sequential games with imperfect information.

Antonín Kříž has more than thirteen years of experience in both software and reverse engineering, and in application and system driver development for Windows and Linux. Antonin is an optimization specialist, and makes things work faster, smarter, and be more secure. He likes algorithmic optimization, profiling and bottleneck analysis, low level optimization, reverse engineering, succinct data structures, automation, NP complete problems, and has deep knowledge of Windows and Linux internals. He is the author and co-author of most scanning engines used by Avast to detect threats (including zero-days) and lots of internal tools and backends for real-time big data processing, which he builds from scratch with C++, Python, and Assembly. Some of his inventions are also patented. If you’re using Avast for Windows, Linux, Mac, or Android, there is a 100% chance that you are using some of his code or inventions.

Viliam Lisy is a Principal Scientist in the Avast AI Research Lab. He also works as an Associate Professor at the Artificial Intelligence Center in the Department of Computer Science at the Czech Technical University (CTU) in Prague. Here, he leads a research group investigating machine learning of near-optimal strategies in competitive multi-agent scenarios. He graduated from CTU, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and Charles University in Prague. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta in Canada. During his studies, he worked at Carnegie Mellon University, Ben Gurion University, and Phillips Innovation Labs. In his research, Viliam focuses mainly on explainable machine learning against adversarial concept drift, learning in sequential games with imperfect information, and applications of machine learning and game theory in cybersecurity.

Tomas Pevny received his PhD in 2008 from the University of Binghamton, SUNY, USA, where he has pioneered machine learning techniques in Steganography and Steganalysis, for which he received an award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. After one year postdoc in Grenoble, France, he has returned to the Artificial Intelligence Center at Czech Technical University in Prague. He has extended his interests to machine learning problems in cybersecurity. He was closely working with Cognitive Security, a startup acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. in 2013. Since September 2019, Tomas has been with Avast and the Artificial Intelligence Center at Czech Technical University in Prague.

Petr Somol has been active in machine learning research for more than 25 years. He obtained his PhD from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague. He worked as a researcher at Cambridge University, UK, and at the Czech Academy of Sciences. After years of academic research he moved to industry. Having tasted the work of a Software Engineer at Oracle, he later joined Cisco Systems as Head of Research responsible for developing the Machine Learning based engine underlying Cognitive Threat Analytics. From February 2020, Petr assumes the role of AI Research Director at Avast. In this role, Petr focuses on solving fundamental AI problems in Threat Defense.

Tomas Trnka is an AI Staff Scientist at Avast. Tomas researches across various disciplines such as phishing, malwaretising, and misinformation from a machine learning and data science perspective. Tomas tries to bridge the gaps between AI and security and tries to apply automation to the processes while adhering to the security standards in terms of the quality in decision making. Tomas is also interested in exploring where digital threats meet attacks, and is trying to exploit human biases and weak spots.

Armin Wasicek is an AI Research Manager and leads the Network Security Lab at Avast. Armin leads research in personalized security and privacy and is looking into the metaverse as a new frontier in consumer security. His interests include applied machine learning, security, privacy, and the Internet of Things. Armin is a Senior Member of the IEEE and holds a PhD and a MSc from the Technical University Vienna, Austria and was a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.