Abstract
The quality of data that is used as input to an information system is proportional to the quality of the solution. Semantics plays a significant role in identifying the most relevant data that lead to a better solution. Semantics actually represents the meaning of things. In this talk we will examine the role of semantics in research topics such as systems integration and cybersecurity. Systems integration is a must and at the same time a necessary evil of enterprises since they need to integrate software apps and/or data to stay competitive as a reaction to changes in the market. For a successful integration one needs to identify the proper mappings of objects across software systems. Semantics comes to assist in automated object mappings towards systems integration using machine learning techniques. In cybersecurity, semantics plays an important role in correctly identifying cyber-attacks (including 0-day attacks) in intrusion detection and prevention systems. An overview of techniques will be presented that utilize context, semantic graphs, and machine learning techniques to correctly identify incoming connections as benign or cyber-attacks. Results show that when using semantics the quality of information increases, leading to significant improvement of metrics such as precision, recall, etc.
About the Speaker
George Karabatis is a Professor and an entrepreneur. He works at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in the Department of Information Systems. He is also the Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Minor at UMBC. He holds degrees in Computer Science (Ph.D. and M.S.) and Mathematics (B.S.). Before joining UMBC he was a Research Scientist at Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore). His research interests are in various aspects of Data Science specifically on identifying and extracting information using semantics and context in an intelligent way to solve interesting problems in research areas such as information and systems integration, detection of cyber-attacks (including 0-days), data anonymization, etc. His work has been published in journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters and he has co-edited a book "Information Fusion for Cyber-Security Analytics" published by Springer. As an entrepreneur he co-founded three startup companies with the help of his students.
