Rate My Professor Chad Williams

Chad Williams is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Central Connecticut State University, where he also serves as the Point of Contact for the university's Cybersecurity Center of Academic Excellence and co-coordinator of the Cybersecurity B.S. and M.S. programs. He previously held the position of Department Chair from 2019 to 2025. Williams earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010, focusing on privacy-preserving machine learning and data mining algorithms for modeling individual activity patterns as part of an NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science with distinction from DePaul University in 2006, with thesis work on detecting profile injection attacks in collaborative recommender systems, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1998. Prior to academia, he worked in software engineering and cybersecurity as a technical architect, project manager, and consultant for Fortune 500 companies in financial services, including Accenture and BlueMeteor Inc. His academic career includes an Assistant Professorship at Bemidji State University from 2010 to 2011 before joining Central Connecticut State University as Assistant Professor in 2011, advancing to Associate Professor in 2020. He has developed 11 courses in computer science, software engineering, and cybersecurity and co-created the Cybersecurity B.S. program, contributing to the university's designations as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations and Cyber Defense by the NSA.

Williams' research specializations encompass applications of machine learning and data mining in cybersecurity, particularly intrusion detection, securing recommender systems, software engineering education, and community-based service-learning projects. He has secured over $1.1 million in external funding, including NSF grants for Scaffolded Projects for the Social Good and scholarships in software engineering, as well as an NSA GenCyber grant. Key publications include highly cited works on recommender system security such as "Toward Trustworthy Recommender Systems: An Analysis of Attack Models and Algorithm Robustness" (2007), "Classification Features for Attack Detection in Collaborative Recommender Systems" (2006), and "Defending Recommender Systems: Detection of Profile Injection Attacks" (2007), alongside recent contributions like "Navigating Multi-Semester Service-Learning in Software Engineering: Strategies for Success" (2025) and "Scaffolded Projects for the Social Good" (2025). His contributions have earned him semi-finalist status for the Excellence in Teaching Award three times, the Outstanding Service Award in 2019, and Best Paper Awards in 2006. Williams serves on the NSA CAE Cyber Operations Working Group, co-authored the 2025 CAE-CO Program Guidance, and participates in program committees for ACM SIGCSE.