26 Jun 2025
I’m currently visiting the German National Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (DFKI) in beautiful Kaiserslautern, Germany. I am here to participate in the 24th European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security. The conference is in full swing, and I am presenting “Supporting Cyber Intelligence Analysts With Enterprise Security Modeling”, which was developed together with Sung Kim and Chris Benson.
Although it is still early in the conference, I have noticed that sovereignty is a recurring theme. A tremendous amount of effort is being channeled into mimizing reliase of the European nation-states on non-EU entities. And it seems to be yielding results! Most of the research that is presented here is relevant, captivating, and advanced.
So much, in fact, that it may actually be that the EU is ahead of the USA when it comes to securing its digital footprint. Whether it is discussions about resilient computing, measuring the effectiveness of the use of CTI, or a view at what’s next after CVSS, the work presented here is spot-on.
Oh; and that’s just before lunch!
08 Jun 2025
I’m heading in to a busy time. This week brings the NYSCIO 2025 Conference in beautiful Skaneateles. The event is always of high quality. I’m looking forward to rejoining the conference after having not attended for almost a decade.
The program lists some very interesting presentations. I particularly look
forward to The Hacker’s Perspective on AI by Etay Maor and to Exponential
Resilience: The Impact of a Regional SOC Model by Andy Bennett and Russell
Ezzell. The final session is Future Friday Panel: Innovation at the Edge —
Empire AI, Quantum, and Cybersecurity by Scott Yoest and Heath Tuttle.
09 May 2025
Regular classes for the Spring 2025 semester are over. We’re about to head into Finals Week, and then the summer. This is a good time to look back.
This year marked the second year of me being Chair of Department. The first year was a bit of a transition shock; we were dealing with a rapidly growing program and I had to pull out quite a few tricks to staff courses. This year was a bit better, but finding instructors for all the course sections we needed to run was still tricky.
In the end, to make it all work, I ended up teaching way too much again. Hopefully, that will be better in the 2025/2026 academic year. We are seeing a bit of a turnaround; the unrestricted growth of the computer science field is definitely over for now and we’re seeing quite a bit of a decline for next year. International students are also not chopping at the bit to come study in the U.S., so that’s a double whammy.
Working together with Sung Kim and Chris Benson, we authored a paper on the research we conducted last summer. The paper will be presented at the European Conference of Cyber Warfare in Kaiserslautern in Germany in a few weeks. Given the workload, I didn’t get to do much research this year.
I did have the pleasure of working with an Honors College student on her undergraduate thesis. Joshanna will defend her work on phishing attacks targetting undergraduate students at U.S. colleges on Monday.
However, even though I haven’t been able to get much research done this year, we were able to put a lot of effort towards new curriculum development. During the academic year, we were able to approve and launch two new programs (a B.S. and an M.S.) in Artificial Intelligence.
Our department has a broad interest in mathematics, statistics, and computer science. AI is positioned at the intersection of these three fields, and several of our faculty members are established scholars in this field.
We have not launched this program earlier because market studies indicated that there would not be enough student interest to generate sufficient enrollment to run the program consistently. With the rapid adoption of generative AI, that has changed, and we took this opportunity to carefully design, develop, and lauch the programs. We aere looking to our first intake in the Fall.
What’s next? We’ll hold our Commencement ceremonies immediately following finals week, and then there will be some travel this summer. In early June, I’ll trek up to the Finger Lakes region of New York State to attend the New York CIO Conference. Its theme this year seems to heavily rely on the intersection between AI and cybersecurity. Perfect for me! Afterwards, a trip to Germany to present the paper.
Once back, I’ll work with my team in IT to update our cybersecurity plans to align with version 2.0 of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, we’ll continue our onboarding of multifactor authentication across the board, update our VPN strategy and update the infrastructure to implement it, decide on an email filtering platform, onboard a new platform for course planning, registration, degree audit, and degree clearance, and do some other random stuff.
All and all, it won’t be a boring summer :-) I might even get some research done!
10 May 2024
The end of the Spring semester is a week away! Time to help my students make
that final push into their last week of classes for the online folks, and into
final exam for the in-person group. For me, and my faculty, the theme is
grading. Ugh!
My undergraduate research students already successfully defended their theses.
Congratulations to Angel, Ashley, and Arfan! The grad students are finalizing
their work as well, and by the end of the coming week, they’re all done too.
Together with another colleague, we’ll continue to work with at least one of
them during the summer to work on a paper based on their work.
Commencement is going to take place on the 21st. Adelphi will take over the
Nassau Collisium for the day, and we’ll have an undergraduate ceremony in the
morning and a graduate ceremony in the afternoon.
Enrollment numbers are looking strong for all five of our programs, and our
enrollment trendline continues to slope up. With all of that, I’ll be more than
happy to complete my first year as Chair of Mathematics and Computer Science,
and I look forward to all of new things that next academic year has to bring
us.
14 Apr 2024
It has been some time since I posted here regarding research. That’s because I
have been busy with many things as a first-year department chair. We’ve been
writing a new Math
& CS Student Handbook, we’ve launched a new hybrid in-person/online pathway
through the MS in CS, we’ve launched a 100% online MS in CS,
and we’ve been working on a lot of new and revised curriculum. It is too early
to share details about that, but I’m excited about it!
I have also been working with three undergraduate Honors College thesis
students, and with two graduate thesis students on research. Their projects
(alphabetical by last name) are:
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Angel Bajracharya has been working on her Honors College research project in which she is exploring if quantum computing is sufficiently mature to be incorporated into undergradate computer science curricula. She has presented her work at the Northeast Regional Honors Council Conference.
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Chris Benson is working on exploring the intersection of Enterprise Modeling, Cyber Threat Intelligence, and Threat Modeling to enhance the framework that Sung Kim and I presented in 2021 (see my bibliography).
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Rodrigo Henriquez is working on a graduate thesis in which he explores the role of malware in human trafficking. This is a topic that is not widely discussed, and his research is showing how much work still needs to be done in that field.
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Ashley Peralta’s adopts an Information Systems perspective to write her undergraduate Honors College thesis. She explores security and privacy in cloud environments, and applies her finding to secondary and post-secondary education. Ashley also presented her work at the Northeast Regional Honors Council Conference.
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Arfan Rasheed’s work revolves around Zero Knowledge Proofs. For his undergraduate Honors College thesis, he is exploring to what extent ZKPs are viable replacements for existing authentication mechanisms used in web and mobile apps.
All five students will present their work at the Adelphi Scholarship and
Creative Works Conference on April 16.