Evolving Data Science/Engineering Solutions through Data Transformation, Machine Learning and Knowledge Fusion

“Perception is nothing but the acquiring of knowledge of, or, on occasions, the acquiring of an inclination to believe in, particular facts about the physical world, by means of our senses,”

(Armstrong, 1961, p. 105)

This site shares some ways I enjoyed looking at things differently facilitating new ways in developing novel cyber detection strategies using aggregate behavior analysis. Essentially, first focusing on data processing and transformation strategies, and then machine learning models (looking how to explain and share models, XAI, and SMM), extended reality research (how to immerse analysts within their data – XR, AR) leading to different ways in perceiving and visualizing the world around us.

Data professionals cover a number of skill sets, especially if they are a domain expert, and also a solid software engineer and architect. When I was starting up a new idea back in 2006, my skill set shifted initially with a focus on Data Engineering (to uniquely transform data sets), then lead into Data Science (to make sense of the transformed data), ML Engineer (creating models to automate classification), and Data Analysts (to tell the story). Generally speaking, you can break apart these roles, and hire pure ML Engineers, and/or Data Engineers. But, in my opinion, innovation (Peter Theil, going from Zero to One) is facilitated with folks that have a deep understanding of the data, how to dream up an innovative data pipeline, and how to initially analyze and tell the story, then pass it onto a team, grow the team from 1 to many.

Starting in 2006, working at Sonalysts (here is a link to My Story), Inc. on a grant from Dept, of Homeland Security, myself and a small team of cyber researchers, system admins, and mathematicians created a proof of concept, and introduced new distributed defense concept we called DMnet (See 2009 CATCH Presentation on bottom), coining a differentiating phrase “Behavior Analytics” to network security. I spent many years giving talks, working with amazing folks from to spread the word, and by 2012 companies started up showcasing different approaches marketing the aggregate behavior analytics (ABA) capabilities. I want to use this site to tell my story, provide the context of how I got there, leading up to the invention, and what I have been doing with the concepts since.

Throughout my career and my personal work I have been pushing the edge to fuse and transform information together to make better sense of it. I think a culmination of that idea can be found in the work that I lead creating new technology to hunt for cyber threats, specifically botnets using aggregate network behaviors, https://www.sbir.gov/node/311162, and now the use of those ideas in healthcare with my good friend Setu Vora http://trustcipher.com.

Trust has so much value now in terms of knowledge sharing, and blockchain. I have the special opportunity to be an advisor at the MIT geospatial lab, where the focus there is on the use and application of blockchain technologies to various domains. https://geospatial.mit.edu/advisors_security.html

Breaking down barriers between domains has allowed me grow, collaborate, and be mentored by some amazing researchers involved in applying nature to cyber threat defense. Dr. Dipankar Dasgupta (https://www.memphis.edu/cs/people/faculty_pages/dipankar-dasgupta.php) has provided much insight in this area, and has connected me with other researchers like Dr. John Williams, of MIT, and Dr. Polly Mazinger of CDC (Creator of the Danger Model), https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/polly-matzinger-phd .

I will use this site to tell a story about a journey taken with a set of adventurous and tenacious set of souls searching for a seemingly impossible solution to challenging and related problems: healthcare risk in the context of pandemics, identifying network signals from botnets and other network threats and threat groups, developing distributed systems handing billions of events deployed in the cloud, developing automated machine control system for cutting fabric, evolving digital recording from analog to digital, and creating intelligent mail sorting equipment. Within the journey, there are segues to experimental music, open water swimming, and lots of family fun.

This story is not so much about myself, but, is more about the teams of women and men and I had the incredible opportunity to work with and create cutting edge technologies.

The cornerstone of this journey is the amalgamation of ideas that occurred in 2006. In that year I had a simple idea based on statistical aggregation and data fusion, Occulex, driving machine learning algorithms in network security, this idea was patented.

Occulex is alive and well today under the leadership of a good friend, Scott Brunza, at Sonalysts, Inc. https://www.netl.doe.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/2019_Annual_Reports/Posters/52_2019_POSTER_SC0018729_NETL.pdf

My Contact Info

mccuskerowen@gmail.com