On Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020, the Strauss Center and the Center for Enterprise and Policy Analytics (CEPA) at The University of Texas at Austin are pleased to welcome Mina Guirguis, professor of computer science at Texas State University, for its "Cybersecurity Speaker Series." This talk is free and open to the public.
The use of game theory has been instrumental in advancing the state-of-the-art in security games and their wide range of applications in protecting various aspects of our cyber infrastructure. Security games allow us to model the interaction between the defender and the adversary and derive potent defense strategies. These defense strategies are randomized, making it difficult for the adversary to predict as well as efficient in utilizing the limited resources available to the defender. In this talk, I will provide some background material on security games, present a common framework for modeling stochastic games and demonstrate its application to various domains. These domains include the design of resilient wireless networks against jamming attacks, the orchestration of a run-time checks against cyber-attacks in industrial control systems and the design of assignment strategies of cyber alerts to analysts for intrusion detection in companies and organizations. I will present samples of results and highlight the challenges we face in these domains.
Guirguis is a professor of computer science at Texas State University, which he joined in 2006. He directs the Intelligent Security Group. His research is broadly driven by the interplay of security, networks and stochastic control with research contributions in the areas of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Networks and Computing Systems and Mobile Cloud Computing. His research work has been published in over 40 refereed papers, posters and journals, as well as one book chapter. Guirguis' research and educational activities are funded with over $3.3M in grants from the NSF, DoD, AFOSR, DHS, IEEE, Cisco and Texas State. Guirguis received the NSF CAREER award in 2012.
Guirguis was a visiting faculty researcher at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in the summers of 2012 and 2013. During the academic year 2014–15 he joined the Mobile and Pervasive Computing Group in the ECE Department at UT Austin. He has been a visiting scholar at the DHS Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) in summer 2016. Guirguis has a wide range of industrial experience at various companies including Fortress Technologies and Microsoft. He has served on various Technical Program Committees for many conferences, on NSF panels and on the Editorial Board for the International Journal on Advances in Networks and Services. He is serving as an Academic Alliance Member for NCWIT and as a senior research fellow in the LBJ Institute for STEM Education and Research.
Guirguis earned his B.Sc. in computer science and automatic control at Alexandria University in 1999, his M.A. in computer science at Boston University in 2005 and his Ph.D. in computer science at Boston University in 2007.