We returned yesterday evening from NYC from
the fabulous Decision and Game Theory for Security Conference, GameSec2016, which took place November 2-4 at the New York University (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering, located in Brooklyn. The view below is from our hotel room on the 18th floor of the Marriott. Since the venue was close to one of my absolutely favorite structures, the Brooklyn Bridge, I had to walk it.
The General Chair of the conference was Quanyan Zhu of NYU and he deserves
a big congratulations on the success of the conference as do
the steering board and all the organizers. This focused conference, with the elegantly produced conference proceedings,
had a single stream of presentations, a panel with experts from the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Agency, industry and academic reps, and two plenary talks given by George Cybenko of Dartmouth and me.
The special session on validating models and the panel were alone worth coming to the conference!
Panel Discussion - Panelists Include:
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Capt. Tom Morkan (US Coast Guard)
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CDR Brian Murphy (US Coast Guard)
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Nathaniel Gleicer (Illumio; Former Director for Cybersecurity Policy for the National Security Council)
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Dr. Pratyusa Manhadatta (HP Labs)
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Ron Sartini (Transportation Security Administration)
It was outstanding to hear from the expert panelists how game theory is essential to their decision-making in practice and that includes such major tasks as protecting th
e Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and the port of Boston. Hearing how research that one engages in can make a difference is very inspiring, motivating, and energizing, and I will be sharing some of the insights when I teach my class on Tuesday at the Isenberg School of Management!
Below are additional photos taken at the conference.
Lunches were provided, as well as snacks during the conference breaks.
On Thursday evening we were treated to a sumptious banquet at NYU's Torch Club in Manhattan. It was great fun to travel together on the NY subway.
Below is a group photo of many of the participants, which was taken on Friday.
As can be seen from
the conference program, the talks described many creative theoretical frameworks that add to our understanding of the strengths of game theory in a wide range of security settings, including: cybercrime and cybersecurity, cyber-physical systems, auditing elections, Internet of Things (IoT), denial of service attacks, strategic cybersecurity investments, voting systems, compliance, denial of service attacks (DOS), and more! I know that I will be reading the proceedings edited by Quanyan Zhu, Tansu Alpcan, Emmanouil Panaousis, Milind Tambe, and William Casey, from cover to cover, and will be citing the papers in this very valuable volume.
What very much impressed me about the participants and their talks and this speaks to the caliber of
this conference, which was started in 2010, was the global participation, with speakers from, besides the US (including California), France, Austria, England, Australia, Greece, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and other countries. The quality of the research and science was inspiring and the conversations and discussions throughout the conference made for very enjoyable networking as well as scientific exchanges.
I was so honored to be introduced by Tamer Basar of the University of Illinois, whom I last saw at the great NETGCOOP conference in Paris, France. Professor Basar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and his work on game theory and security is truly innovative and, if I may say, beautiful.
My friend, Rae Zimmerman of NYU also stopped by to say hello before flying out to speak at a conference in Portland. Below is a photo of Quanyan Zhu with Rae and me after my plenary talk.
My plenary talk slides can be downloaded here.
Another highlight was to see the Springer booth with books on security, including a book in which my husband, my doctoral student, Shivani Shukla, and I have a book chapter:
A Supply Chain Game Theory Framework for Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability, Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Shivani Shukla, in
Computation, Cryptography, and Network Security, N.J. Daras and M.T. Rassias, Editors, Springer International Publishing Switzerland (2015) pp 381-398.
And, on Friday, several of us, coincidentally, just happened to be wearing the NYU school color of purple, so I had to have the photos below taken as mementos.
To add to the excitement of the conference was that the NYC marathon is taking place today, November 6, 2016, so we also saw the planning for this mega race with about 50,000 participants taking part and with the finish line in Central Park and with a mini international race taking place in NYC in Manhattan yesterday morning. Since my fist language is Ukrainian I was delighted to see the Ukrainian flag in Central Park.
Thanks to Quanyan Zhu and the conference organizers for such a memorable, exciting, and very informative conference!
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