shakarian.net
The Homepage of
Paulo Shakarian, Ph.D.
Currently I am a Major in the U.S. Army and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, U.S. Military Academy, West Point. Additionally, I am a Research Fellow with the West Point Network Science Center, as well as an Affiliate Scholar with the West Point Cyber Research Center. I am also the primary investigator for the Algorithmic Network Science Group.
News:
May 14, 2013 Elsevier recently featured a short article I wrote on Chinese Cyberwar on their blog Elsevier Connect.
March 29, 2013 I was recently quoted in The Economist on Chinese Cyberwar R&D. You can see the full article here.
February 19, 2013 Our new book, Introduction to Cyber-Warfare, is avaialable for pre-order on Amazon.com.
From the cover:
Cyber Warfare has become a global problem threatening governments, corporations and individuals. This new domain of warfare is not only inhabited by governments such as China, Russia, Iran, and the United States, but a variety of other actors including insurgent groups like Hezbollah and Hamas as well as hacking groups such as Anonymous, LulzSec, and others. According to a recent analysis the global market for Cyber Warfare consulting, product development and protective services will reach a value of $15.9 billion in 2012. This in-depth text on cyber warfare, written by experts on the front lines, explores the cutting edge world of cyber-warfare including the following:
- Provides a multi-disciplinary approach to Cyber-Warfare analysing the information technology, military, policy, social, and scientific issues that are in play
- Presents detailed case studies of cyber-attack including inter-state cyber-conflict (Russia-Estonia), cyber-attack as an element of an information operations strategy (Israel-Hezbollah) and cyber-attack as a tool against dissidents within a state (Russia, Iran)
- Explores cyber-attack conducted by large, powerful, non-state hacking organizations such as Anonymous and LulzSec
- Covers cyber-attacks directed against infrastructure such including water treatment plants, the power-grid and a detailed account on the Stuxent worm
- Describes the state-of-the-art in intelligence-gathering malware platforms including Duqu, Flame, and Gauss as well as how social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn are also leveraged for this purpose
- Explores acts of cyber-warfare against industry including those against Aramco, Google, and others
December 22, 2012 My new book Introduction to Cyber-Warfare, written with my wife, Jana, and our colleague, Andrew Ruef, is now available for pre-order from Elsevier. It is expected to hit shelves in June, 2013.
December 14, 2012 Check out more recent press coverage on Shaping Operations to Attack Robust Terror Networks on the Army's Science and Technology page (by Mike Strasser, originally in the Pointer View) and on The Verge.
December 6, 2012 Noah Shachtman wrote a great article this morning for Wired's "Danger Room" blog on our recent work on terror networks. The academic paper and a video on this work is also available.
November 21, 2012 Recently, a paper I worked on with Devon Callahan, Jeff Nielsen, and Tony Johnson was accepted to Social Informatics-12. See Devon Callahan describe the research on YouTube. Jeff wrote a nice summary for the lay reader in the NSC NewsBlast and a preprint is available on arXiv.
October 20, 2012 I was recently mentioned in an article published on Industrial Safety and Security Source that was later ran on the Inter Press Service News Agency. The article states that, according to me, a hacking group known as the "Iranian Cyber Army" began as a organization within the Iranian military. This is not precisely what I stated as I do not know this information to be factual. What I stated was that based on reports from Iranian dissidents, it is thought that this group originated within the Iranian military.
September 20, 2012 My article on the Stuxnet worm, originally published in Small Wars Journal is now translated in Spanish and is available here in Air and Space Power Journal.
September 19, 2012 One of my students, Jeff Nielsen, was featured on www.army.mil for some of our counter-IED analysis work. You can read the full story here. Great work, Jeff!
September 18, 2012 I recently gave a talk on viral marketing at Notre Dame. The video is available on YouTube here.
August 30, 2012 SCARE featured on UPI.
August 28, 2012 The West Point NSC has introduced a new webpage dedicated to SCARE. This site is a one-stop-shop for all information on SCARE, IED cache-finding software, and geospatial abduction.
August 23, 2012 The Pointer View recently featured an article on West Point cadets using the SCARE software to support operations in Afghanistan. The article is available here from the Pointer View and here from www.army.mil.
August 21, 2012 My paper "Social Network Diffusion Optimization Problems" where we use logic programming to find influential nodes in a labelled social network is now available from ACM TOCL here. You can read about it on the NSC blog as well.
August 3, 2012 We currently have a 1-year non-tenured Assistant Professor / Research Fellow position open at West Point for Computer Science. Great opportunity for a Ph.D. You can find the announcement here.
July 18, 2012 The article "Using RASCAL to Find Key Villages in Afghanistan" was published online today by Small Wars Journal. In this work, my group presents a software package designed better allocate Special Forces teams on a counter-insurgency battlefield.
July 17, 2012 This morning I was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article entitled "Computer analysis predicted rises, ebbs in Afghanistan violence." If you are interested in learning more about my work on finding weapons caches, please check out my work on SCARE and Geospatial Abduction described in this blog-post. If you are interested in learning more about my work dealing with large data-sets, such data extracted from social networks, you may find my work on viral marketing interesting as well.
May 20, 2012 The paper "Large Social Networks can be Targeted for Viral Marketing with Small Seed Sets" by myself and Damon Paulo was accepted to the 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM). This work was accepted as a full paper. Only 16% of submissions were accepted as such.
May 3, 2012 Three of the students that I advise, Sean Eyre, Randolph Rotte, and Theodore Taggart recently won "Best Computer Science Project" and "Best Network Science Project" at the 2012 Cadet Projects Day (at West Point) for their senior capstone work entitled "Research on Insurgent Network Graphs" (RING). These three have put in much hard work on this project over the past year - well done, guys!
April 19, 2012 My work on SCARE will be featured in the April 21st edition of The Economist. The article is available online and entitled "The Science of Civil War: What Makes Heroic Strife." Please note that the new version of SCARE mentioned in the article will leverage route-trafficability, not phone-traffic patterns as stated in the article.
April 6, 2012 I have just been awarded a new grant by the Army Research Office for a project entitled "Combinatorial and Scalable Initiation in Complex Networks."
March 30, 2012 Earlier this month, Geoffrey Moores presented some of our recent work on mean time to fixation in evolutionary graphs at the INSNA Sunbelt XXXII conference. Check out my recent blog post relating to this talk and the slides.
February 3, 2012 Currently, I am involved in some new work using the SCARE software. Check out this article about it in the NSC Newsletter.
November 23, 2011 My article entitled The 2008 Russian Cyber Campaign Against Georgia is now published online in Military Review.
November 17, 2011 The book Geospatial Abduction: Principles and Practice that I wrote with V.S. Subrahmanian is now available for purchase from Springer. Click here for a flyer.
November 7, 2011 Patrick Roos presented a paper he and I wrote at CIB-11. Slides from the talk are available here. You can read more info on this work at the West Point NSC.
September 28, 2011 Patrick Roos, Anthony Johnson and I wrote a review on Evolutionary Graph Theory. It was recently accepted by the Elsevier journal BioSystems. A pre-print of the review is available here from the West Point NSC.
September 22, 2011 My new book, Geospatial Abduction: Principles and Practice, written with V.S. Subrahmanian, is available here from Springer Publishing for pre-order.
September 20, 2011 My paper, Fast and Deterministic Computation of Fixation Probability in Evolutionary Graphs, done in collaboration with Patrick Roos was accepted to the 6th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Bioinformatics.
August 5, 2011 My paper, Adversarial Geospatial Abduction Problems, done in collaboration with John Dickerson and V.S. Subrahmanian was accepted to the journal ACM Transaction on Intelligent Systems and Technology. I previously gave a talk on a preliminary version of this research at an ARO workshop a few months ago. Slides from that talk are here.
July 11, 2011 Uffe Kock Wiil's book Counterterrorism and Open Source Intelligence that features the chapter Region Based Geospatial Abduction with Counter-IED Applications, written by myself and V.S. Subrahmanian is now available from Springer here.
June 27, 2011 The Military Review article, What is old is New: Counter-IED by Disrupting the Weapons Supply, that I wrote with LTG(ret) Otstott is now available online from USA-CAC. Click here for the full issue.
