Houston Security Workshop 2015

Big Data and Cyber Security: A Statistical Viewpoint

When: Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Where: PGH 563
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. Davis J. Marchette, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, Virginia

Host: Prof. Rakesh Verma

Computer security naturally results in very large amounts of extremely complex data, and this provides unique challenges.

I will discuss some of the problems inherent in computer security from the perspective of a statistician, in particular the problems involved in obtaining good data from which to design detectors and classifiers for computer and network intrusion detection.

I will discuss some of the methodologies that statistics and machine learning bring to the table, and will illustrate some of these ideas on a small problem of classifying malicious code.

Bio:

Dr. David Marchette is a Principal Scientist at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD), Dahlgren, VA, where he is responsible for leading basic and applied research projects in computational statistics, graph theory, network analysis, pattern recognition, computer intrusion detection and image analysis.

Dr. Marchette has a B.A. and an M.A. in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego, and a Ph.D. from George Mason University in Computational Sciences and Informatics (specializing in computational statistics). Dr. Marchette has taught as an adjunct faculty at George Mason University and Johns Hopkins University. He has sat on the dissertation committees of several students, and continues to serve on dissertation committees at Johns Hopkins University.

Before coming to Dahlgren, Dr. Marchette worked at the Naval Ocean Systems Center from 1985 until 1994. He has been involved in basic research throughout his career.

Dr. Marchette is a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is an associate editor for the journal Computational Statistics, and is active in several professional societies, having held office in the Interface Foundation and the Section on Statistics for Defense and National Security of the American Statistical Association. He has helped organize several conferences, including a conference on computer security, an Interface conference, and the 2008 Joint Statistics Meeting.

Dr. Marchette is the author of over 40 refereed journal publications, and has authored two books: Computer Intrusion Detection: A Statistical Viewpoint, Springer, 2001, and Random Graphs for Statistical Pattern Recognition, Wiley, 2004. In addition, he has authored 8 book chapters and myriad conference papers and technical reports.