Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Network Science for Cybersecurity

We recently heard the good news that our project, "Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enterprise Security," is being funded by the Advanced Cyber Security Center (ACSC). The project team consists of - from UMass Amherst: Professor Wayne Burleson of the College of Engineering, and Professors Mila Sherman and Senay Solak from the Isenberg School of Management, plus me, and from MIT - Professor Andrew Lo of the Sloan School, who needs no introduction.  This project is actually a second step, following in the footsteps of our first ACSC project, which was a Prime the Pump project, "Cybersecurity Risk Analysis and Investment Optimization," with Chris Misra of OIT of UMass also being on that project with us.

On Friday, September 19, 2014, we will be holding a workshop at the Sloan School at MIT on the theme of the new project and we are busy now with teleconferences and finalizing the organization of the day. We expect over 50 attendees and have already had a great response from various financial service firms, insurance companies, MITRE, RSA, and EMC, to start. We also expect participation from researchers of neighboring universities, and even pharmaceutical firms.

It should be a very exciting event.

The Co-PIs will be giving presentations and we are also scheduling panels for a lot of discussion.

I will be speaking on Network Science for Cybersecurity. This topic encapsulates nicely much of the research that my group at the Supernetworks Center has done on network vulnerability and resiliency. I also plan on including some of our latest results on cyber crime, which I had the pleasure of speaking on last year at the great INFORMS conference in Minneapolis and also, in a broader context,at the INFORMS Analytics conference in Boston last April, which was simply fabulous!
 The above presentation can be downloaded in its entirety here.

We are very grateful to the ACSC for their continuing support and vision!