Aug 2020: Transitioning Cybersecurity Research to Practice - Success stories and tools you can use

"Transition to practice is really a passion of mine. It is wonderful to write papers and have great ideas. But it is even cooler to get a million people using it." – Professor Patrick Traynor.

Join us to hear exciting Cybersecurity Research success stories, and lessons learned along the way, from Professor Patrick Traynor from the University of Florida who has successfully transitioned his research to practice in a number of ways. One of his technologies, the Skim Reaper, is being used across multiple U.S. states to protect from credit card skimming. We will also share tools that Trusted CI has developed to help you take the Transition To Practice journey as a developer and researcher. Florence Hudson and Ryan Kiser will present the "Trusted CI TTP Playbook" available on the Trusted CI website, with TTP Tools you can use. This includes a TTP Canvas to enable the researcher and developer to clarify their target users, value proposition, and how they will TTP. We also include a TTP Technology Readiness Level (TRL) assessment tool to design your technical journey to mature and transition to practice your valuable research.

Speaker Bios:

Florence D. Hudson is a Special Advisor at Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, co-leading the Transition To Practice (TTP) program. She has led TTP at IBM, Internet2 and Trusted CI. She is a former IBM Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Internet2 Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer, and Aerospace and Mechanical Engineer at Northrop Grumman and NASA. She is Executive Director for the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub at Columbia University, and Founder and CEO of Advanced Technology and Diversity & Inclusion Consulting Firm FDHint, LLC. She received her BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, and completed Executive Education at Harvard Business School and Columbia University.

Ryan Kiser is a Senior Security Analyst at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. Ryan has worked on information security projects across a wide variety of domains including leading efforts to assess and improve the security of automotive engine systems, performing risk assessments for university central IT systems, and supporting researchers in efforts to adhere to regulated data requirements such as HIPAA, FISMA, and various CUI requirements. Ryan has been heavily involved in organizations serving information security needs for higher-ed and national research communities. Some of these include the Open Science Grid (OSG) as a member of the OSG Security Team and Trusted CI where he has led engagements to assist NSF-funded research projects in improving their security posture. His current interests involve novel applications of predictive modeling, machine learning, and brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Patrick Traynor is a professor of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the University of Florida. Patrick's research focuses on the security of mobile systems, with a concentration on telecommunications infrastructure and mobile devices. His research has uncovered critical vulnerabilities in cellular networks, developed techniques to find credit card skimmers that have been adopted by law enforcement and created robust approaches to detecting and combating Caller-ID scams. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2010, was named a Sloan Fellow in 2014, a Fellow of the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion in 2016 and a Kavli Fellow in 2017. Professor Traynor earned his Ph.D and M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2008 and 2004, respectively, and his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Richmond in 2002. He is also a co-founder of Pindrop Security, CryptoDrop, and Skim Reaper.

Dr. S. Jay Yang received his BS degree in Electronics Engineering from National Chaio-Tung University in Taiwan in 1995, and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998 and 2001, respectively. He is currently a Professor and the Department Head for the Department of Computer Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology. He also serves as the Director of Global Outreach in the Center of Cybersecurity at RIT, and a Co-Director of the Networking and Information Processing (NetIP) Laboratory. His research group has developed several pioneering machine learning, attack modeling, and simulation systems to provide predictive analysis of cyberattacks, enabling anticipatory or proactive cyber defense. His earlier works included FuSIA, VTAC, ViSAw, F-VLMM, and attack obfuscation modeling. More recently, his team is developing a holistic body of work that encompasses ASSERT to provide timely separation and prediction of critical attack behaviors, CASCASE to simulate synthetic cyberattack scenarios that integrates data-driven and theoretically grounded understanding of adversary behaviors, and CAPTURE to forecast cyberattacks before they happen using unconventional signals in the public domain. Dr. Yang has published more than sixty papers and worked on eighteen sponsored research projects. He has served on organizing committees for several conferences and as a guest editor and a reviewer for a number of journals and textbooks. He was invited as a keynote or panel speaker for several venues. He was a recipient of Norman A. Miles Outstanding Teaching Awards, and a key contributor to the development of two Ph.D. programs at RIT and several global partnership programs.