Invited Speaker

Empowering Cognitive Security Systems with Cyber Situation Awareness

Vincenzo Loia (Rector of University of Salerno)
Full professor of Computer Science
Department of Business Science-Management and innovation Systems
University of Salerno-Italy


Abstract:
To solve the pressing security challenges of our era related also to threats such as terrorism and cyberterrorism, we need more creative approaches able to detect connections between relations, events and concepts in evolving contexts characterized by structured and unstructured data coming up from multiple sensors and human based networks. In this talk I propose the adoption of Cyber Situation Awareness (SA) to define systems able to handle such issues. Endsley provided a formal definition that considers SA as a three-phase process: perception of the elements of an environment in each time interval, comprehension of these elements and projection of their states into the near future. In detail, from a computational viewpoint, Cyber SA aims at formalizing and deducing situations (occurring in the real world) by processing, fusing and abstracting data and information. The Cyber SA approach needs to be populated with computational intelligence techniques, such as Granular Computing, fuzzy and rough sets, able to gather, pre-process, aggregate and filter data coming from sensors (both physical - coming from sensing devices - and virtual - coming from social networks), to sustain conceptualization and reasoning on situations. In this talk I present some concrete examples of applying the Cyber SA to safety & security and Intelligence Analysis for counterterrorism.

Biography:
Vincenzo Loia graduated in Computer Science at the University of Salerno in 1985, and received his PhD in Computer Science in 1989 at the Université Pierre & Marie Curie Paris VI, France. He is currently a Computer Science Full Professor at the University of Salerno, where he served as a researcher from 1989 to 2000, and as associate professor from 2000 to 2004. Since the beginning of his career he has shown a deep and operational research interest, in particular in the use of innovative approaches for complex problems solving through the use of new paradigms of software design and programming, i.e. those of agent and multi-agent systems; in the design and experimentation of systems for approximate reasoning, through the synergistic use of standard semantic technologies, Description Logic and Fuzzy Logic; in the definition of original conceptual data analysis methodologies for knowledge extraction from unstructured sources; in the implementation of decision support systems conveyed by artificial intelligence models, cognitive architectures, computational intelligence and granular computing. With respect to the latter, he demonstrates the capability to understand, apply and contribute to research on models, such as Granular and Cognitive Computing, which strongly base their principles on aspects concerning the study and analysis of human cognitive processes. These research interests have characterised his international outreach through which he has established a rich network of scientific collaborations with researchers worldwide (including a close relationship with the founder of the Fuzzy theory, Lotfi Zadeh). Over the years, the pillars of his scientific research have been applied in various application domains, from medicine to law, and more recently in the cyber-intelligence field. It is exactly in this latter context, that he shows his great aptitude to multidisciplinary, by coordinating the scientific committee of the "Multidisciplinary Observatory for the fight against organised crime and terrorism", which implements ongoing scientific research applied to the Computational Intelligence area and aimed at contrasting terrorist activities spread on the Web and Deep Web, to support information analysis projects for crimes of the DNA (National Anti-Mafia and Counter-Terrorism Directorate). Moreover, his competences are used to support research related to the 4th industrial revolution, as demonstrated by his scientific responsibility and participation in national projects on smart manufacturing (Leonardo 4.0 - €10M), and international projects on cyber physical systems (CPS4EU - €100M). Lastly, both in the project area and in scientific research, he has shown remarkable team-building skills, bringing together heterogeneous knowledge around original and innovative ideas. All this is witnessed by the large number of co-authorships, on scientific publications, with colleagues from other scientific- disciplinary fields and by the collaborations, established in the framework of research and development projects, with corporate partners and departments in scientific areas, including also those different from Computer Science.