2. 12 IEEE Systems, Man, & Cybernetics Magazine July 2016
discussions, and facilitate training, education, and
outreach programs.
The TCHS activities performed so far include
◆◆ publishing several edited books and a research mono-
graph on intelligence and security informatics with
Springer and Elsevier
◆◆ editing more than five journal special issues on securi-
ty informatics and surveillance
◆◆ organizing more than ten conferences, workshops, and
special sessions on topics related to homeland security.
Currently, the TCHS has nine members, but this number
is going to grow in the near future. It is among the objec-
tives of the current leadership to enroll new members
strongly interested in topics related to homeland security
and critical infrastructure (CI) protection, coming from
both the academic and industrial worlds, who are willing to
actively contribute their ideas and proposals to the TCHS
activities. Since homeland security is a highly cross-
discipline and cross-country sector, technical and geo-
graphical diversity will be an added value for the TCHS.
We have tried to sketch a reference list of current hot
topics in homeland security and CI research. The list
includes (but it is not limited to)
◆◆ convergence between cybersecurity and physical security
◆◆ integrated, holistic, and cohesive approaches to safety
and security design, evaluation, and testing
◆◆ physical security information management systems
◆◆ cybersecurity of industrial control systems
◆◆ CI resilience models, metrics, and indicators
◆◆ intelligent multimedia surveillance (multimodal
approaches and audio-video analytics)
◆◆ emerging cloud computing and Internet of Things
security issues in CI
◆◆ sensor networks and smart devices for security
◆◆ threat, vulnerability, and risk assessment for CI
◆◆ interdependency analysis of CI as cyberphysical sys-
tems-of-systems
◆◆ socioeconomic, procedural, privacy-related, and
human factors in CI
◆◆ advanced sensing and detecting technologies for CI
◆◆ attack/penetration testing and other simulation tech-
niques for CI security evaluation
◆◆ CI intrusion detection and prevention systems
◆◆ CI business continuity, contingency planning, incident
response, and emergency and crisis management
◆◆ applications, case-studies, and industrial experience
reports in CI domains, including smart-cities and
smart-transportation.
These will be the tentative topics that will be included in a
special issue of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man,
and Cybernetics, which we are organizing with the sup-
port of the editor-in-chief.
It is clear that, due to the highly heterogeneous sector,
a comprehensive list of topics is very difficult to sketch,
and the current topics are rapidly evolving or being spe-
cialized as new technologies are introduced and new
threats are discovered. The complexity, due to systems
size, distribution, and heterogeneity, is, at the same time,
I would like to thank the former TCHS chair Prof. Daniel
Zeng (University of Arizona, United States) and SMC
VP Prof. Rodney Roberts (Florida State University, United
States) for their great support.Allow me to introduce the
new TCHS leadership:
◆◆ Francesco Flammini, Ansaldo STS (Naples, Italy),
chair
◆◆ Qiudan Li, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing,
China), cochair
◆◆ Justin Zhan, University of Nevada (Las Vegas,
Nevada, United States), cochair
◆◆ Chris Yang, Drexel University (Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, United States), cochair
As you can see, the TCHS chairs represent three
different continents (Europe, Asia, and North America),
and this is a first sign demonstrating the global
importance of the topics related to homeland security
and the joint efforts that are being carried out all over
the world to protect the citizens and the environment
from large scale threat scenarios.
TCHS Leadership
3. July 2016 IEEE Systems, Man, & Cybernetics Magazine 13
an obstacle and a stimulating challenge for future
research and engineering initiatives.
Personally, I believe that, from a methodological view-
point, many areas related to design-for-security and
model-driven engineering still need to be explored in
their multifaceted possibilities, currently representing
only a research niche. The same holds for formal, stochas-
tic, and multiparadigm modeling used to address complex-
ity and uncertainty by divide et impera, modular,
compositional, multilevel, and hierarchical approaches.
From the technology viewpoint, rapidly evolving arti-
ficial vision and hearing algorithms pave the way to new
scenarios in which they are increasingly integrated, e.g.,
in wireless sensor networks and drone surveillance.
A vision of the future of homeland security cannot
ignore the political strategy to find a balance between
surveillance technologies and social issues, also address-
ing ergonomics, privacy norms, and laws, as well as
appropriate procedures and regulations. The relevance of
those issues is regularly witnessed by the never-ending
discussions on closed circuit television boundaries and,
more recently, body scanners using millimeter waves or
terahertz cameras, not to mention the futuristic and
sometimes visionary evolutions of biometric identifica-
tion, like DNA-based people recognition and tracking.
Whatever the future of homeland security will look like,
computer science and engineering will continue to play a
central role, enabling new paradigms in intelligent moni-
toring through big-data, information fusion, early warning,
and automatic situation assessment. This will be the sub-
ject of an IEEE lecture (e-learning tutorial), “Threat Detec-
tion and Modeling,” which is among the first achievements
planned for my mandate.
Please do not hesitate to contact me at francesco.
flammini@ieee.org should you have any suggestions, if you
need further clarifications, and particularly if you want to
apply as a new TCHS member (please attach your curricu-
lum vitae and a short letter of motivation).
About the Author
Francesco Flammini (francesco.flammini@ieee.org)
earned his Ph.D. degree in computer and control systems
engineering at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. He is
an IEEE Senior Member and chair of the IEEE Systems, Man,
and Cybernetics Technical Committee on Homeland Security.
References
[1] IEEE SMC TCHS. [Online]. Available: http://www.ieeesmc.org/technical-activities/
systems-science-and-engineering/homeland-security
[2] F. Flammini, R. Setola, and G. Franceschetti, Effective Surveillance for
Homeland Security: Balancing Technology and Social Issues. Boca Raton,
FL: CRC, 2013.
[3] F. Flammini, Critical Infrastructure Security: Assessment, Prevention, Detec-
tion, Response. Southampton, U.K.: Wessex Institute of Technology Press, 2012, 1–326.
[4] European Commission Horizon 2020. Secure societies—Protecting freedom
and security of Europe and its citizens. [Online]. Available: https://ec.europa.eu/
programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/secure-societies-%E2%80%93-protecting-
freedom-and-security-europe-and-its-citizens
