This talk gives an introduction to the Center for Advancing Education and Research on Critical Infrastructure Resilience (CAESCIR), a new project at the Florida International University (FIU), sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

1. Introducing FIU CAESCIR
PI: Jason Liu (Florida International University)
This material is based upon work supported by DHS under Grant Number 2017‐ST‐062‐000002
Center for Advancing Education and Studies on Critical Infrastructures Resilience

2. 2

3. Florida International University (FIU)
• Founded in 1972, located in Miami, Florida
• One of the 12 Florida state universities
• Among top ten largest universities in US with ~55,000 students
• Minority-serving university (61% Hispanic, 13% African American)
• Contributes almost $9B each year to local economy in South Florida
• Carnegie R1 research university (with highest research activities)
• #1 for Hispanic and #5 for African American in number of undergraduates
awarded with engineering degree (ASEE)
• #2 in Florida “America’s Best Employers” (Forbes Magazine)

4. School of Computing and Information
Sciences (SCIS)
• 29 tenured or tenure-track faculty members
• Over 2000 students, including 200+ MS students, 90+ PhD students
• Offers BS, MS, PhD degrees in CS; MS in Telecommunication &
Networking, Cybersecurity, IT; and BS and BA in IT
• Computer Science ranked #39 for Total and Federally funded R&D
Research Expenditures for FYs 12-15 (NSF HERD Survey)
• Computer Science and Math ranked #1 in Research Expenditures
among high Hispanic enrollment institutions (NSF HERD Survey)
• Largest provider of Hispanic graduates at BS, MS and PhD levels in
computer science and engineering

5. SCIS National Awards
NSF CAREER Awardees (Li, Liu, Rangaswami)
Fellows (Iyengar, Chen)
Fellows (Iyengar, Weiss)
Fellow (Iyengar)
Fellow (Iyengar), Distinguished Scientists (Chen, Liu, Smith, Weiss)
Distinguished Educator (Weiss)
Faculty Awards (Iyengar, Li, Rangaswami, Rishe, Sadjadi)
Many FIU awards to faculty
Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Society of Agile Manufacturing (Iyengar)

6. Center for Advancing Education and Studies on
Critical Infrastructures Resilience (CAESCIR)
• Program: DHS Scientific Leadership Awards (SLA) for Minority
Serving Institutions (MSI)
• Project Period: 5 years (2017-2022)
• Program Officer: Stephanie Willett
• The Mission:
“To provide as an integrated research and education framework
with a specific focus on improving our nation’s critical
infrastructures security and resilience.”

7. Proposed Activities
1. Scholarships for students specialized in HS-STEM areas
2. Coordinated education of HS-STEM topics
3. Pursue research in HS-STEM areas
4. Engage early career faculty to pursue integrated HS-STEM
research and education activities
5. Partner with DHS Center of Excellence (Critical Infrastructure
Resilience Institute at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

8. 1. Scholarships for students specialized in
HS-STEM areas
• 7 undergraduate students
• 3 PhD students
• Student recruitment: website, brochure, information session
• Student performance tracking: full-time, GPA, participation of
center activities, productivity (esp. for graduate students)
• Academic advising: undergraduate students required to meet with
faculty mentor at least twice per semester
• Peer mentoring: undergraduates in research mentored at research
labs
• Social events: orientation, social events, symposium,
conferences, and possible COE research meetings
• Internship and career services: summer internship, career fair, …

9. 1. Scholarships for students specialized in
HS-STEM areas
• All students must be US citizens
• All students must maintain GPA ≥ 3.3/4
• All students must work for Homeland Security Enterprise
after graduation within one year (except going to grad
school, military service, or public health service)
• Student tracking, internship, and career services
• Undergraduate support: tuition + $18K/year stipend
• Graduate support: tuition + $31K/year stipend
• Including SCIS supplement to increase stipend +$6K/year
for undergrad and +$7K/year for grad

10. 2. Coordinated education of HS-STEM topics
Pilot new
curriculum
Assess outcomes
Adjust
Evaluate for
interest &
engagement
Disseminate
Modular
Curriculum to
the broader
computer
science
community

11. 2. Coordinated education of HS-STEM topics
Evaluation
•Evaluate existing curriculum for opportunities for integration
•Evaluate CISR business curriculum for opportunities for adaptation to computer science
Curriculum
Development
•Modular unit development for integration into existing computer science courses
Integration
•Identify courses and instructors for curricular integration
•Integrate modular units into existing computer science courses
Pilot
•Modular units will be integrated into two courses to pilot lesson plans and outcome
achievement
Data
Collection
•Data will be collected from CISR integrated courses
•Data includes: pre- and post-surveys, focus groups, and instructor and student interviews

12. 3. Pursue research in HS-STEM areas
• Eight projects on critical infrastructure resilience under three themes:
• Theme 1: Modeling resilient critical infrastructure systems:
• Modeling and simulation of interdependent critical infrastructures
• Modeling population-level psychological resilience to catastrophe
• Theme 2: Algorithmic foundations for infrastructure resilience:
• Robust opponent exploitation in imperfect-information games
• Emergency logistics operations using local computation algorithm
• Theme 3: Applications for infrastructure resilience
• Machine learning malware detection for infrastructure resilience
• Deep learning for social network fraud detection
• Real-time spam detection across online social networks at scale
• Distributed multi-robot patrolling strategies for critical infrastructure monitoring

13. • Phase I: Measuring & Modeling
• Data: Language Artifacts: News & Social Media
• Base Techniques: Natural Language Processing
• New Approaches: Event Timeline Analysis, Narrative
Extraction, Narrative Grouping
• Phase II: Big Data Collection & Analysis
• Historical Collection: Twitter Firehose, Lexis-Nexus, etc.
• Analysis: Machine Learning and Statistical Testing
• Questions:
• Which particular narratives of panic/resilience are most likely to
resonate with a population?
• Are particular narratives of resilience more effective than others?
• Can we use the data be used to design effective, just-in-time public
information campaigns?
Mandalay Bay
Massacre,
Oct 1, 2017
Hoaxes and
Fake News
Spread Panic
Sample Project: Mark Finlayson
Modeling Population-Level Psychological
Resilience to Catastrophe

14. Fraud Detection and Prevention
• FairPlay: Search Rank Fraud and
Malware Detection
• Use features extracted from user
behaviors
• FraudSys: Fraud Preemption System
• Detect fraud when created
• Impose Bitcoin-like computational
puzzles
• User action not posted until puzzle is
solved
Sample Project: Bogdan Carbunar
Upload App/Malware
Developer
Crowdsource
Search Rank Fraud
Workers
Fake
installs &
reviews
User
Install
Rate,
Review
1
2
3
Search Rank Fraud in Online Services

15. Robust Opponent Exploitation in Imperfect-
Information Games
• Many problems in security (both cybersecurity and national security) have
benefitted immensely in recent years from game-theoretic modeling
• Optimal thresholds against phishing attacks, randomized airport screening
• In many models, some information is private and
available to only some of the agents
• Defender may only know probability distribution
over attacker’s payoffs.
• Game-theoretic solution concepts fail to
take into account opponent behavior, but
pure opponent modeling can perform
poorly against strong/deceptive opponents
Sample Project: Sam Ganzfried

Full
opponent
exploitation
Game-theory
solution
concepts
e.g., Nash
equilibrium)
????
Exploitation
Exploitability

16. Adversarial Multi-Robot Patrolling
Sample Project: Leonardo Bobadilla
• Patrolling: Problem of repeatedly visiting a
sequence of regions in an environment with a
number of robots to prevent the intrusion
• Challenges:
• Adversaries always try to penetrate environment.
• Deterministic or frequency-based patrolling policies
can easily be exploitable.
• This problem in an adversarial setting also intractable
• Solution: Use the non-deterministic and distributed
patrolling policies Visibility-based Non-deterministic Patrolling
• Preliminary Ideas:
• The environment is considered as a graph.
• Find minimum size subset of regions that cove the
whole environment for each robot
• Each robot will patrol independently
• Develop a stochastic policy based on a Markov
chain that minimizes the average commute time
for that subset of regions.

17. 4. Engage early career faculty to pursue integrated
HS-STEM research and education activities
• PI Team: 10 faculty members, 6 are early career faculty
• More senior members take mentorship roles and day-to-day activities
Bobadilla Finlayson
Liu
Ganzfried Hu Ross Xie
Iyengar Carbunar Graham

18. Center Organization
• Steering Committee:
• Center Leadership Team: Jason Liu, Sitharama Iyengar
• Coordinator for Education and Workforce Development: Monique Ross
• Coordinator for Research Development: Bogdan Carbunar
• Recruitment and Dissemination Committee:
• Recruit students (especially undergraduate students)
• Administer CAESCIR scholarship, and student summer internships
• Administer student travel awards to attend DHS meetings, workshops, and conferences
• Outcome and Metrics Committee:
• track and measure Center’s outcome and reporting to the Steering Committee on a quarterly basis
• Metrics: student performance (academic and career development), faculty productivity
• External Advisory Board:
• DHS community, partner COE leaders, infrastructure providers and stakeholders, industry, other
governmental agencies, and other universities
• Review Center’s education and workforce development plans and research programs, make
recommendations
• Assess annually the progress of the Center in reports to the Center Director and DHS Manger
• Centers and Institutes Evaluation Committee (from university)

19. 5. Partner with DHS Center of Excellence
(CIRI at UIUC)
• Undergraduate summer internships
• Collaborative teaching with CIRI faculty who will give guest lectures
at relevant FIU courses and joint course development on critical
infrastructure resilience topics
• Participation of DHS workshops and meetings for faculty and
students from both institutions
• Collaboration on research projects for faculty and students with
mutual interests in critical infrastructure resilience
• Frequent interactions between the centers’ leaders to continuously
align the research and education activities of both institutions

20. Thank You!
This material is based upon work supported by DHS under Grant Number 2017‐ST‐062‐000002