Cybersecurity Workforce Optimization

This afternoon we had the great honor and pleasure of hosting INFORMS Fellow Dr. Les Servi of the MITRE Corporation who spoke in the UMass Amherst  INFORMS Speaker Series, which is organized by our magnificent UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter.

Dr. Servi has two degrees in Applied Math from Brown University and a PhD in Engineering from Harvard. He has had a terrific career, having worked at Bell Labs, GTE (now Verizon), MIT Lincoln Labs, and now MITRE.  He is a champion of Operations Research and our professional society INFORMS and he is a good friend. Les is the Group Leader of the Decision Analytics Group at MITRE. (A disclaimer - he hosted me for my talk at MITRE on March 14).

Joining Les were: Brian Kulig, who is a UMass Amherst alum, and also Ken Kato, both of MITRE.

I hosted the lunch in his honor at the University Club, where the service was great and the food very good. We arrived at 11:30AM to make sure that we would have enough time to eat before his talk at the Isenberg School at 2PM. Joining us were Associate Dean of Engineering Tilman Wolf, Professor Eric Sommers of Math/Stats, and Professor Weibo Gong, of ECE, who shared the same advisor at Harvard with Les - Dr. Ho, who is still publishing at age 82.

The Title of Les's talk was: A Two-Stage Stochastic Shift Scheduling Model for Cybersecurity Workforce Optimization with On Call Options.

We took a photo when we arrived at the Isenberg School for his talk.

His presentation was very interesting and clear. He explained both stochastic programming and column generation in a very accessible way. I was very impressed and intrigued by the possibilities of Operations Research and Optimization in workforce optimization in this challenging sector. The model was for scheduling over a two week period three shifts of workers with quite interesting constraints and uncertain demand with the option of calling in more workers. The three classes of cyber workers included an expert group (which someone caught did not want to work the night shift).  He even compared the results of the stochastic model with a deterministic model and presented quite extensive computational results.

I was very pleased that, although it was a holiday weekend, the audience had undergraduate students, PhD students from Engineering, Math, and the Isenberg School, and even MBA students. Two of the latter have internships at MITRE in Bedford this summer, so the talk was perfectly timed.

And, as always happens after a great presentation, the audience members enjoy milling around, sampling refreshments, networking, and chatting.

Afterwards, I was very pleased that Professor Brian Levine of our Computer Science Department, who is the Director of the new Cybersecurity Institute at UMass Amherst, and the PI on the $4.2 million NSF Scholars for Service (SFS) grant, could meet with Les and MITRE colleagues in my office.

Les has spoken in our series multiple times and he always impresses, whether he is speaking on tracking pirates, extracting information and emotions from social media, including Twitter, or on cybersecurity workforce optimization!

In April, he will be heading u to Montana to investigate research on rural healthcare and then will be off right afterwards to the INFORMS Analytics conference in Orlando!

Many thanks to Dr. Les Servi for coming out to UMass Amherst and speaking in our series today. Special thanks also to MITRE colleagues, Brian Kulig and Ken Kato, for joining in and making the visit very rewarding for students and faculty alike!

Had a Great Time Speaking at MITRE on Cybersecurity on Pi Day

This week is Spring Break at UMass Amherst and I began my break by flying last week to speak on perishable product supply chains at the University of Buffalo, which I blogged about.

This past Monday, I did not have to fly, and just drove, to Bedford, Massachusetts, to speak on a different topic - that of cybersecurity - at MITRE Corporation.

My wonderful host at MITRE was INFORMS Fellow Dr. Les Servi, who also happens to be a Brown University alumnus with two degrees in Applied Mathematics. I have a PhD in Applied Math from Brown (and three other degrees from there) but Les's PhD  is from Harvard. We share a passion for Operations Research! He is a member of the Defense Science Board and frequently travels to DC. He has worked on many fascinating problems at GTE, Verizon, MIT Lincoln Labs, and now at MITRE. I still remember the talk he gave at the Isenberg School in our great UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series on tracking pirates. He will be speaking at the Isenberg School on March 25 on cybersecurity workforce optimization, which is not to be missed.

I had been to MITRE in Bedford before for an I3P meeting with Dr. Kevin Fu, a cybersecurity expert extraordinaire, who is renowned for his hacking into medical devices. Kevin is no longer at UMass but has moved to the University of Michigan.  I admit, when I was graduating Brown, I had interviewed with MITRE, but in McLean, VA, and had offers from 3 different groups there, so I have always had a warm spot for this company, which is quite unique. Les told me that the Bedford campus has 2,500 employees with the remainder, about 6,500, being in Virginia.

Les treated me to a fabulous buffet lunch at Bamboo, which is very close to MITRE, and which had a spread of sumptious Asian cuisines and desserts. Joining us were 7 colleagues of Les's.

Since it was Pi Day I had to snap the photos below.

In addition, Les and I found out that his colleague, also a cybersecurity expert, Harriet Goldman, is a Brown University Applied Math alumna, so we had the photo below taken of the three of us. This made the visit extra special.

Plus, joining us at lunch were two UMass Amherst alums: Brian Kulig, who had received a degree in Engineering, and Peter Salemi, who was an Isenberg School and Math alumnus! Brian went on to get a Master's at Georgia Tech, and Peter went on to Berkeley to study Operations Research and received a Master's there and then a PhD from Northwestern, working with Barry Nelson.
 
Les gave me a tour of some of the facilities at MITRE and they are stunning.

I also very much liked the room in which I spoke and my talk was videostreamed to MITE in Mclean, Virginia. MITRE has a basketball court and exercise facilities and nice places to meet as well as food areas. It is surrounded by greenery.

 Les did a great introduction.

My presentation was on our latest research on cybercrime and cybersecurity with a fcus on game theory.

I thank him for taking the photo below during my presentation.

Having great questions from brilliant people after my presentation made for a spring break day and Pi Day very well spent and very enjoyable.

Many thanks to Dr. Les Servi, an operations research star, and to his MITRE colleagues, for making my visit to MITRE so pleasant and intellectually rewarding. I hope that new collaborations will evolve from this great visit and experience.

A Brilliant Talk on Social Media Analytics + Sports by Dr. Les Servi of Mitre

Yesterday, at the Isenberg School of Management, we had the distinct pleasure of hosting Dr. Les Servi of MITRE, who is an INFORMS Fellow (and whom I have known since our days at Brown University as undergraduate students). Dr. Servi delivered a brilliant talk on his latest research on the topic: Analyzing Social Media Data Having Discontinuous Underlying Dynamics.

Dr. Servi's presentation was part of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speakers Series, which the Student Chapter helps me to organize and to host.

His talk was on his paper in Operations Research Letters, just hot off the press, and published in the November issue.

The paper begins with the statement, which immediately captures your interest (as did his talk): Although physical objects follow well understood Newtonian physics and are free of discontinuous dynamics, emotional intensity dynamics evolve continuously with unknown dynamics until a tipping point or external event triggers a discontinuity. 

In his presentation, Dr. Servi asked whether anger has dynamics (the same about sadness and positive emotions). Is there a formula that can capture the anger of citizens and is there a  momentum associated with anger? He concluded that sadness (and other emotions) follow dynamics that are different from those of rockets since there are discontinuities. His paper not only presents a model for a more nuanced dynamic for emotions but also a dynamic programming  algorithm to solve the associated optimization problem that identifies times of emotional discontinuities. He then illustrated the new method for the  analysis of mood shifts reflected in 380,000 Twitter messages related to one of the world’s most popular soccer teams, Manchester United, during their 2011–12 season.  He was impressed that so many in the audience at the Isenberg School knew of this team and its sport (a finance audience at a talk he gave in Boston did not recognize the team).

And what Dr. Servi discovered through analyzing the data was fascinating and not what one would expect immediately. The figure below displays the Mood Shift Analysis of the Twitter messages showing a breakpoint on 2/6/2012 and 5/14/2012.

The discontinuities in mood associated with certain dates were not due to wins or losses of one of the world's most popular sport franchises (and one student in the audience had been to Manchester games) but one marked the anniversary of the following event: the tipping point found on February 6, 2012, might be due, according to Dr. Servi,  to it being the 54th anniversary of an airplane crash in Munich which killed 8 Manchester United players and 3 staff and injured 9 other players as well as the team manager. Among serious Manchester United fans this event and date are well known despite it happening so long ago.

 

With a great talk such as this, our minds just percolated with ideas and questions. I asked whether MITRE had applied for a patent since the possible applications from finance to politics were simply stunning and the answer was ,"Yes," --  see here.   One of my colleagues, Dr. Ryan Wright,  asked a question about acceleration, which I thought was really interesting -- for example, could the model and algorithm track herding/crowding behavior? Dr. Rod Warnick of our great Hospitality and Tourism Management Department also asked a great question about seasonality with reference to Google as did several of the students. My colleague, Dr. Senay Solak, continued the conversations.


The discussions lasted as time just flew by until close to 4 o'clock and I think the students from the Isenberg School and the College of Engineering that came as well as the faculty will never forget this talk. We thank Dr. Les Servi for the clarity and brilliance of his talk! The previous time that Dr. Servi spoke in our series was in the Fall of 2006 when he talked about tracking pirates (and that was even before such activities hit the news).

 

Special thanks also to Dr. Bruce Weinberg, the Chair of the Marketing Department at the Isenberg School, and a social media star,  and to Dr. Weibo Gong of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMass Amherst, whose PhD advisor at Harvard University was Professor Larry Ho (also Servi's advisor), who joined Dr. Servi and me for lunch at the University Club.

After lunch, Dr. Servi and many others joined us in a celebration of the  3 awards that we received at the INFORMS conference in Minneapolis. The cake was delicious and the company simply wonderful with even Dr. Amir Masoumi joining us from Manhattan College.

 

What a great time to be an Operations Researcher living in an era with a proliferation of data. What information will the data reveal and what new discoveries?! And as Dr. Les Servi said, Philip Morse, a pioneer of Operations Research, would be very pleased.
 

Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P) Meeting at MITRE

After teaching my undergraduate class in Transportation & Logistics this past Wednesday, I was picked up by Dr. Kevin Fu of the CS Department at UMass Amherst (who also taught his undergrad class that morning) and we headed to the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P) meeting that was taking place at MITRE in Bedford, MA.

I3P is a consortium of academic institutions, government labs, and nonprofit organizations that focuses on information infrastructure protection. This consortium is led by Dartmouth College. Its new Research Director, Dr. Shari Pfleeger, formerly of Rand, assumed this position on September 1, 2010. She is terrific and very knowledgeable and dynamic.

UMass Amherst is a member and Dr. Fu is the rep from UMass while I have been appointed the alternate. The member map is available here. The talks and brainstorming sessions were terrific over the past two days as were the many conversations that took place during the breaks and at the dinner Wednesday night at the Bamboo restaurant (simply magnificent).

I personally very much enjoyed meeting with consortium members from the University of Idaho, the Idaho National Laboratory, Indiana University, the University of Tulsa, Carnegie Mellon University, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, SRI International, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and MITRE. When you get a group of very engaged and smart researchers together, the intellectual discussions are very rewarding and exciting. Also, one can't beat face -to-face communications.

You can find more information on the I3P here.

I was pleased to see my research on transportation, the Braess paradox, and the wisdom of crowds featured in the September 2010 issue of I3P Researchers in the News.