11/14/19 | 4:15pm | E51-335
Reception to follow.
Les Servi
Chief Scientist
The MITRE Corporation
Abstract: Cyber security and asset protection efforts are becoming more difficult as technological advances broaden the scope and scale of integrated systems. Mission networks organize and quantify the dependencies between cyber assets in the system. The system representation allows for valuation of the impact of assets on system performance to aid preemptive and reactive decision making. Mission network representations have inherent uncertainty due to the subjective nature of their creation. This uncertainty requires robust valuation methods for informed decisions which is frequently ignored. We address this omission by presenting optimization techniques that hedge against mission network uncertainty. This approach produces actionable information for the defensive network host, such as optimal reconfiguration to bolster the network or identifying optimal nodes to harden, and equally actionable information for the offensive adversary.
This talk is based on joint work with Damon Frezza, Anthony Rojas, and Kael Stilp.
Bio: Dr. Servi received his Ph.D. in engineering from Harvard University, worked at Bell Laboratories and GTE (now Verizon) Laboratories pursuing telecommunication research, served 1 year as a visiting scientist at Harvard University and MIT, and worked at MIT Lincoln in the areas of communication and tracking. He currently is a Chief Scientist at The MITRE Corporation. At MITRE he has contributed to a diversity of areas including the analysis of social media, portfolio analysis, cyber security, and evaluating Human Social Culture Behavior (HSCB) government sponsored projects. In 2010-11, he served on a Defense Science Board task force on Counterinsurgency and in 2016 served on a summer Defense Science Board task force about Constrained Military Operations. In 2017, he received a Certification of Appreciation from the DNI James Clapper.
Dr. Servi has an extensive publication record in the area of Operations Research and 11 patents derived from his analysis. He has been very active in INFORMS and served on its Board of Directors for 6 years. In 2004 he was named Fellow of INFORMS. In 2013 he became the founding Chair of the new INFORMS Social Media Analytics subdivision. He was previously Chair of the INFORMS Telecommunication Society, the INFORMS Applied Probability Society and is currently the chair of the INFORMS Boston Chapter. He has been an editor of Operations Research, Management Science, INFORMS Journal of Computing, and has served on Ph.D. thesis committees at Harvard University, MIT, Washington University and Boston University. He was recently elected to the Board of Directors of MORS.