CIRI 2022 Annual Meeting

Presentation Slides

Please click the picture below to access a pdf version of the slides for the full event.  Individual presentations are linked below in the agenda.

December 6, 2022

Critical Infrastructure Resilience:  The National Imperative

0800-0830  Breakfast     
0830-0900

Welcome/Introductions

(Video from Dr. Martinis)

30 min

David Nicol, Director and Principal Investigator
Director DHS Office of University Programs 
Susan Martinis , Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation

0900-0930 Keynote Address: The Imperative of Critical Infrastructure Resilience and Its Challenges (slides) 30 min Brian Gattoni, CTO, CISA
0930-1000 CIRI – Building a Legacy (slides)
  • Research
  • Tech Transition
  • Education & Workforce Development
30 min David Nicol
1000-1015 Networking Break 15 min  

Delivering Impact Today

1015-1200

Technology Transition:

  • Port Disruption Tool (slides)
  • Business Resilience Calculator (slides)
  • PRIISM: Probabilistic Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure System Modeling
  • ISCRAM: Infrastructure Supply Chain Risk Analysis and Mitigation (slides)

 

1 h 45 min

 

1200-1300 Lunch 1 h  
1300-1340

Technology Transition (cont): 

  • AI for Disaster Planning (slides)
  • Cyber Secure Dashboard/CyberTalent Bridge (slides)

40 min

 

1340-1500

Current Research:

  • Characterizing End-to-End Risk in the 5G Telecommunications Supply Chain
  • Next-Generation 911 System Interoperability Testing (slides)
  • EMP Risk Assessment and Mitigation Prioritization (slides)
  • Protecting Our Nation’s 911 System from Cyber Threats Current and Future (slides)

1 h 20 min

 

1500-1515

Networking Break

15 min

 
1515-1545

Education & Workforce Development

  • Development of a Robust Nationally Accessible Cybersecurity Risk Management Curriculum

30 min

 

December 7, 2022

Toward a Stronger Tomorrow 

0900-0930  Continental Breakfast     
0930-0945  Day One Recap                                                                                                                                               15 min CIRI
0945-1055 

New Research Projects:

  • Backup Network Timing for 5G Networks
  • Backup Network Timing for Mission Critical P25 LMR Networks 

New Project Thrusts & Challenge Areas

  • Virtualized ICS Testbed for Research, Training and Education
  • Promoting the Resilience of Communities and Infrastructure Facing Wildfires

70 mins

 

 

1055-1110

Networking Break

15 mins

 
1110-1200

On the Horizon (panel/open forum)

50
mins

Illuminate and discuss emerging challenges to critical infrastructure
1200-1300

Lunch + Wrap Up & Concluding Remarks

60 mins

 

Biographies for Presenters

David Nicol

David Nicol

Prof David M. Nicol is the Herman M. Dieckamp Endowed Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign, and a member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  He also serves as the Director of the Information Trust Institute (iti.illinois.edu), and the Director of the Advanced Digital Sciences Center (Singapore). He is PI for two national centers for infrastructure resilience: the DHS‐funded Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (ciri.illinois.edu), and the DoE funded Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium (cred‐c.org); he is also PI for the Boeing Trusted Software Center, and co-PI for the NSA‐funded Science of Security lablet.

Prior to joining UIUC in 2003 he served on the faculties of the computer science departments at Dartmouth College (1996‐2003), and before that the College of William and Mary (1987‐1996). He has won recognition for excellence in teaching at all three universities. His research interests include trust analysis of networks and software, analytic modeling, and parallelized discrete‐event simulation, research which has led to the founding of startup company Network Perception, and election as Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the ACM. He is the inaugural recipient of the ACM SIGSIM Outstanding Contributions award, and co‐author of the widely used undergraduate textbook “Discrete‐Event Systems Simulation”.

Nicol holds a B.A. (1979) degree in mathematics from Carleton College, M.S. (1983) and Ph.D. (1985) degrees in computer science from the University of Virginia.

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Randall Sandone

Randall Sandone is Executive Director of the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute, which is part of the University of Illinois’ Information Trust Institute.

Sandone is responsible for the administrative, operational, and financial and project management of the Institute and serves as a primary point-of-contact with DHS and partnering organizations. He reports to the Institute Director who is responsible for the overall success of the enterprise and who ensures that rigorous academic standards are being applied to all research initiatives. Sandone works with research partners to ensure that projects are aligned with DHS strategic priorities; are executed on schedule and within budget; and deliver meaningful products and services to the homeland security and critical infrastructure communities.

He has had a comprehensive career guiding research and technology projects in settings ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. His strengths lie in relationship building and project management.

His professional experience is in the software development and cyber security sectors. As part of the executive leadership for a number of globally-oriented companies, he was responsible for technology transition and licensing, commercialization, and product development. He established strategic alliances with companies such as Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Fujitsu-Siemens. Mr. Sandone also helped market information trust and assurance solutions to the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and the Department of Homeland Security.

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Susan Martinis

Susan Martinis is Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she provides leadership for the campus-wide interdisciplinary research institutes, promotes new research initiatives, and oversees the administrative and business processes that ensure the safe, ethical, and productive conduct of research at Illinois.
 
Dr. Martinis, the Stephen G. Sligar Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, studies the mechanisms, evolution, and biomedical applications of protein synthesis and RNA-protein interactions. She is a successful researcher, engaged in entrepreneurial and corporate partnerships, a committed educator, and an experienced administrator.
 
Susan A. Martinis earned her B.S. from Washington State University (1985) and Ph.D. at the University of Illinois (1990). She then trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow. She was hired in 1993 at a start-up biotechnology company Cubist Pharmaceuticals as its 3rd employee. Dr. Martinis was awarded the company’s first U.S. patent and National Institutes of Health SBIR grant, before moving to academia at the University of Houston in 1997. Cubist Pharmaceuticals grew to over 600 people, developed the life-saving drug Cubicin, and was acquired in 2014 by Merck Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Martinis also contributed to delineating the mechanism of action for a novel lead antimicrobial drug (AN2690; Rock et al, Science) that was developed by Anacor Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Pfizer in 2016) and made commercially available as the anti-fungal Kerydin in 2014.
 
Professor Martinis earned tenure in Houston, Texas where she received the University of Houston’s highest teaching honor, the Enron Teaching Excellence Award as well as the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Teaching Excellence Award. She was also recognized by the Houston Alumni Organization with the Outstanding Faculty Award.
 
Dr. Martinis moved to the University of Illinois in 2005, and in 2009 was promoted to the rank of Professor, as well as appointed Head of the Dept. of Biochemistry and also Head of the Dept. of Medical Biochemistry. Professor Martinis was named a University Scholar, and in 2015 honored by appointment as the inaugural Stephen G. Sligar Endowed Professor in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology. She is a member of the Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology and an Affiliate in the Dept. of Chemistry. In addition, she received a prestigious Fellowship from the University of Illinois to participate in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s (Big 10 Academic Alliance) Academic Leadership Program in 2011-12, as well as the University of Illinois System Presidential Executive Leadership Program in 2018-19. From 2014-15, Professor Martinis served as Interim Associate Dean over the Biological, Chemical, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and subsequently returned to her position as Head of the Department of Biochemistry. After serving as the interim Vice Chancellor for Research for two years, in 2019, she was named Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation.
 
Dr. Martinis contributed significantly to the founding of the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine, which offers a paradigm-shifting approach to teaching medicine that is engineering-based. She served on the initial curriculum committee, as well as the Search Committee that hired the College’s first Dean. She was the Interim Director of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering on the Dean’s inaugural leadership team.
 
Professor Martinis’ research focuses on mechanisms, evolution, and biomedical applications of protein synthesis and RNA-protein interactions. Her investigations center on the family of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, in particular leucyl-tRNA synthetase, where she has made significant contributions for 30 years to understand quality control mechanisms, tRNA recognition, non-canonical roles in mitochondrial group I intron splicing, as well as novel activities of human enzymes. Her research program has been federally supported by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. She has also received previous funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation, the Human Frontiers Science Program, The Robert A. Welch Foundation, the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, and the Texas Advanced Research Program. The goal of her current research team is to discover and characterize non-canonical activities of as many as twenty splice variants of mammalian leucyl-tRNA synthetases. Break-throughs in understanding the evolution of tRNA synthetase activities have potential to redefine systems biology and yield innovative biomedical therapeutics.
 
Professor Martinis was elected to the Executive Committee of the APLU Council on Research and has served as President of the Association of Medical and Graduate Departments of Biochemistry (AMGDB) across North and Central America. She has served as an inaugural member of the National Institutes of Health Molecular Genetics A study section, as well as participated in Review Panels for the National Science Foundation. Dr. Martinis was an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Biological Chemistry for five years.

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Keynote Speaker - Brian Gattoni, CTO, CISA

Brian R. Gattoni is Chief Technology Officer for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where he is responsible for the technical vision and strategic alignment of CISA data and mission services to manage risk to federal networks and critical infrastructure. CISA works with partners to defend against today’s threats and collaborating to build more secure and resilient infrastructure for the future.

Previously, Gattoni was the Chief of Mission Engineering and Technology, responsible for developing innovative analytic techniques and new approaches to technology insertion to increase the value of DHS cyber mission capabilities. In 2015, Gattoni was named DHS Systems Engineer of the Year. 

Prior to joining DHS in 2010, Gattoni served in various positions at the Defense Information Systems Agency and the United States Army Test and Evaluation Command.

Gattoni holds a Master of Science in cyber systems and operations planning from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).

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Gabriel Weaver

Dr. Gabriel A. Weaver is a researcher at the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Senior Critical Infrastructure Analyst at Idaho National Laboratory.  Weaver’s research generally focuses on ways to analyze cross-organizational, inter-infrastructure risk by integrating modeling and simulation and applied systems security.  His research at UIUC has focused on the Port Disruptions Tool (PDT), a framework to analyze cross-infrastructure disruptions and their operational and economic impacts on the Maritime Transportation System (MTS).  As an Alumni Venture Group (AVG) Fellow for Green D ventures, Weaver's interest in technology transition led him to participate in a National Science Foundation (NSF) National I-Corps cohort hosted by the New England Regional Innovation Node (NERIN) at MIT as well as a recent Homeland Security Startup Studio (HSSS) cohort. Weaver holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from Dartmouth College, as well as a B.A. in Classics and Mathematics from the College of the Holy Cross.  

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 Noah Dormady

Noah Dormady is an award-winning economist and public policy professor at The Ohio State University. He specializes in energy and environmental policy and economics, economic resilience to natural hazards, risk and decision analysis, and applied public policy analysis.

Dormady’s research evaluates the relationship between government regulation and markets (e.g., electricity markets, carbon markets) and how the design of markets for critical infrastructure impacts society. His research also evaluates how businesses are affected by disruptions to critical infrastructure that occur in disasters, and what those businesses can do to cost-effectively bounce back. Similarly, his research also evaluates how decision-makers of all types respond to disruptions, disasters, and government regulations, market designs and policies.

His research has been published in a broad array of peer-reviewed journals and government publications. These include Energy Economics, The Energy Journal, Risk Analysis, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the International Journal of Production Economics, Natural Hazards Review, the Journal of Public Policy, and the Journal of Commodity Markets. He serves as Associate Editor for Natural Hazards Review and the Journal of Critical Infrastructure Policy.

His work has been funded by an array of federal, state, private and nonprofit organizations. These include the Department of Homeland Security, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the National Center for the Middle Market, the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation and the Center for Climate Strategies.

He is a fellow at two U.S. Department of Homeland Security Centers of Excellence; the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) at the University of Illinois, and the Center for Risk and the Economic Analysis of Threats and Emergencies (CREATE) at the University of Southern California. He is the 2012 co-recipient of the national REMI Award for Economic Analysis from Regional Economic Models Inc. Dormady received his doctorate from the University of Southern California.

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Adam Rose

Adam Rose is a Research Professor in the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy, Senior Research Fellow of USC’s Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Threats Emergencies (CREATE), and Faculty Fellow of USC’s Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy. He is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute at the University of Illinois, and of the Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency at Arizona State University. Previously, he held faculty and department chair positions in energy and environmental economics departments at The Pennsylvania State University and West Virginia University, as well as a faculty position at the University of California, Riverside. He received his PhD in economics from Cornell University. 

Professor Rose’s primary research interest is the economics of disasters.  He has spearheaded the development of CREATE’s comprehensive economic consequence analysis framework and has done pioneering research on resilience at the level of the individual business/household, market/industry and regional/national economy.  He has also completed dozens of case studies of disaster consequences, resilience and recovery, including the September 11 terrorist attacks.  He is currently the PI on an NSF grant on advanced computational methods to improve reliability and resilience of interdependent systems and a contract with the Critical infrastructure Institute to measure static economic resilience. He recently headed a study for FEMA that analyzed a deductible/credit system for its Public Assistance Program.  He also recently served as an advisor to the United Nations Development Programme on disaster resilience and to the World Bank on financing disaster risk management.

His other major research area is the economics of energy and climate change policy.  As a consultant to the United Nations, he played a major role in the development of the first proposal for a system of globally tradable emission allowances, presented at the Rio Earth Summit.  More recently, he has advised government agencies in several U.S. states and regions on the development of cap & trade programs and has advised several states and Baja California, Mexico on the employment impacts of climate action plans.  He was recently a Co-PI on a subcontract to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to evaluate the regional economic impacts of the City of Los Angeles transitioning to an all renewable electricity service capability.  Professor Rose has done pioneering research on the aggregate and distributional impacts of climate mitigation policy by advancing methodologies in both computable general equilibrium and macroeconometric modeling.  He has also evaluated the economic impacts of twenty major energy technologies, including both fossil fuels and renewables, most recently offshore wind development in California.

Professor Rose is the author of several books and 250 professional papers, including most recently Defining and Measuring Economic Resilience from a Societal, Environmental and Security Perspective (Springer), Economic Consequence Analysis Tool (Springer), and The Economics of Climate Change Policy (Elgar).  He has been appointed to the editorial boards of Economics of Natural Disasters and Climate Change, Environmental Hazards, Journal of Integrated Disaster Risk Management, International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, The Energy Journal, Resource and Energy Economics, Energy Policy, Pacific and Asian Journal of Energy, Journal of Sustainable Energy Engineering, Energies, Resource Policy, and Journal of Regional Science.

Professor Rose has served as the American Economic Association Representative to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Institute of Building Sciences Multi-Hazard Mitigation Council and of the Advisory Board of the Center for National Policy Resilience Forum. He recently completed a 3-year term President of the International Society for Integrated Risk Management (IDRiM).  He is the recipient of the IDRiM Distinguished Research Award, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, East-West Center Fellowship, American Planning Association Outstanding Program Planning Honor Award, Applied Technology Council Outstanding Achievement Award, Regional Economic Models Outstanding Economic Analysis Award, DHS/CREATE Transition Product of the Year Award, Sir Richard Stone Best Paper Prize in Economic Systems Research, and Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis Outstanding Article Award.  He is a Fellow of the Regional Science Association international and of the Society for Risk Analysis. 

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Iris Tien

Dr. Iris Tien is Williams Family Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She joined the faculty in 2014 after receiving her Ph.D. in Civil Systems Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Tien’s research interests are in probabilistic methods for modeling and reliability assessment of civil infrastructure systems. Her research leverages her unique interdisciplinary expertise encompassing traditional topics of civil engineering, sensing and data analytics, stochastic processes, probabilistic risk assessment, and decision making under uncertainty. Dr. Tien’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Transportation, and National Institute of Standards and Technology. Her work on interdependent infrastructure systems modeling and analysis has twice won 1st Place Paper Awards in resilient critical infrastructure. She was selected by the National Academy of Engineering to organize the session on Resilient and Reliable Infrastructure at the U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium; and speak on Community Resilience at the National Academies Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Symposium. Dr. Tien was awarded the prestigious Early Achievement Research Prize by the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability (IASSAR), and her published work has been selected as Editor’s Choice selections in both the ASCE Journal of Infrastructure Systems and the ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems.

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Junaid Farooq

Junaid Farooq is an Assistant Professor of ECE at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His research interests are broadly in the security and resilience of cyber-physical systems, and the Internet of things (IoT). He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn, NY. Prior to that, he obtained the M.S. and B.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, and the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan. He has also worked as a researcher at the Qatar Mobility Innovations Center (QMIC) in Doha, Qatar. During his time at NYU, he was awarded several awards for excellence in teaching and research. He was also the recipient of the NYU University wide Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technology and Applied Science in 2021. He is currently leading a team of researchers in the 2022 cohort of the NSF Convergence Accelerator Track G on securely operating through 5G networks. Website: http://www.junaidfarooq.com

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Bistra Dilkina

Dr. Bistra Dilkina is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, co-director of the USC Center of AI in Society, and the inaugural Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Early Career Chair at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Her research and teaching center around the integration of machine learning and discrete optimization, with a strong focus on AI applications in computational sustainability and social good. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2012 and was a post-doctoral associate at the Institute for Computational Sustainability. Her applied research in Computational Sustainability spans using AI for wildlife conservation planning and for preventing wildlife poaching and trafficking, using AI to understand the impacts of climate change in terms of energy, water, habitat and human migration, and using AI to optimize fortification of lifeline infrastructures for disaster resilience. She has over 80 publications and has co-organized or served as a chair to numerous workshops, tutorials, and special tracks at major conferences.

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Glen Salo

Glen Salo

An electrical engineer by education and profession, Glen is an entrepreneur that has successfully established multiple technical teams and organizational units to support government programs, private industry, and public good missions for small, large, and independent not-for-profit businesses. He began his leadership roles by forming a technical team to design antennas for ultra-wideband radars and develop simulation tools for lightning strike prediction. From there, he established multiple organizational groups that provided computational physics, software development, accredited web services, remote sensing, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), web application development, and food industry services for diverse private and public sector markets. He has a strong technical background in electromagnetic phenomenology, scientific software development, and engineering analysis and design; and he has extensive experience leading multi-organizational research programs. A native of Michigan, Glen earned a BSE in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan and an MS in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois.

 

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Anderson Wiese 

Anderson Wiese began his software career on the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois in 1977. His work in the decades since has traversed military intelligence tools, video signal processing, home automation and geo-spatial systems. Since founding 2wav 25 years ago, Anderson's team has specialized in ontology-based information systems, distributed data architectures, and internet-of-things applications, always with a passion for design and usability. 2wav worked with the Information Trust Institute to develop the PBCONF power-grid component validator. Recent work with CIRI proudly includes CyberTalent Bridge and the Business Resilience Calculator. 

 

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Walt Magnussen

Dr. Walt Magnussen is the Director of the Texas A&M University Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center (ITEC), a leading center in next generation communications interoperability.  The ITEC supports 5G wireless testbeds both at Disaster City for public safety and the RELLIS Campus for defense.  Funded by the Department of Homeland Security, US Department of Transportation,  and the Department of Defense the ITEC completed the first NG 911 proof of concept,  supported the DHS public safety border crossing experiment with Canada and supported Harris County (Houston area) public safety broadband network which led to FirstNet.  Dr. Magnussen received his bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Minnesota and his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University.   

 

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Jose Schutt-Aine

José E. Schutt-Ainé received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1981, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Urbana, in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He joined the Hewlett-Packard Technology Center, Santa Rosa, CA, as an Application Engineer, where he was involved in research on microwave transistors and high-frequency circuits. In 1983, he joined UIUC, and then joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department as a member of the Electromagnetics and Coordinated Science Laboratories, where he is currently involved in research on signal integrity for high-speed digital and high-frequency applications. He is a consultant for several corporations. His current research interests include the study of signal integrity and the generation of computer-aided design tools for high-speed digital systems. Dr. Schutt-Ainé was a recipient of several research awards, including the 1991 National Science Foundation (NSF) MRI Award, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Faculty Award for Research in 1992, the NSF MCAA Award in 1996, and the UIUC-National Center for Superconducting Applications Faculty Fellow Award in 2000. He is an IEEE Fellow, EPS Distinguished Lecturer, and served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology (T-CPMT) from 2007 to 2018.

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Karthik Balasubramanian

Karthik Balasubramanian

Mr. Karthik Balasubramanian has over thirty (30) years of experience as a Technology/ Cybersecurity Consultant, Program Manager, and IT Architect for various private sector companies and government agencies, including the DoD.  Karthik is a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Lead Assessor. In this role, he has conducted over 40 assessments of FedRAMP 3rd Party Assessment Organizations (3PAOs). Karthik has over 18 years of experience in FISMA, RMF and security Certification & Authorization (C&A) processes. He has led large C&A efforts and successfully obtained full Authority-to-Operate (ATO) for several DoD/DHS systems, both on-prem and in the cloud, including High Value Asset (HVA) systems.

In 2008, He started Karthik Consulting, LLC (KC) to provide    independent and unbiased recommendations, implement solutions, and be a trusted advisor to its customers. KC is CMMI-DEV Level 3,  ISO 9001, 27001, and 20000-1 certified company with a DCAA approved accounting system and a Top Secret facility clearance. Prior to starting KC, Karthik was the Chief Engineer of an Army program (~$100M/year). In this role he led a ~100 member software team and successfully helped obtain CMMI-DEV Level 3 certification for the program and several ATOs for the Army system.  Karthik also previously founded iBiz Systems, a Seattle based technology consulting firm, that supported large companies like Costco, Boeing, and Microsoft and several “dotcom” startups launch their products and services. 

Karthik has a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Computer Science and also holds the following industry certifications: PMP, CISSP, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), ITIL v3, Microsoft - MCSD for .NET Early Achiever, MCSD, MCDBA, Oracle - OCP DBA, and CompTIA Security+. 

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Casey O'Brien

Casey W. O'Brien is the Assistant Director for Cyber Defense Education and Training with the Information Trust Institute in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
 
Casey has more than 25 years of large-scale information security and IT engineering, implementation, and management experience in challenging and cutting-edge public and private sector environments.

Casey’s teaching and research interests include: practice-centered education and training solutions that combine accelerated learning programs, validated assessments, instruction, practice labs, and challenge scenarios to improve information security talent management in organizations; rapid deployment of customizable and adaptive curriculum that raises learner capability maturity in foundational security concepts, tactics, techniques, and procedures; and formative credentialing solutions that increase the number of capable professionals. 

Casey is the Technical Editor of five textbooks: Ethical Hacking & Systems Defense, Linux Server Fundamentals, Information Security Fundamentals, Introduction to Scripting, and Networking Fundamentals. 

Casey earned a B.A. in Psychology from the University of St. Thomas, an M.A. in Psychology from Duquesne University, and is currently enrolled in an Education Policy, Organization & Leadership (EPOL) concentration in Learning Design and Leadership (LDL) Ph.D. program in the College of Education at UIUC.

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 Scott Sotebeer

Scott is the founder and CEO of Sotebeer Management Ventures, LLC and USA Strategics, a leadership and change management consulting company. His engagements have included providing subject matter expertise related to Next Generation (NG)911 for CIRI and the University of Washington Applied Physics Cyber Security and Computer Science AI Modeling labs. He is a member of Interpares AI, Canada, providing first responder and emergency communications expertise to several working groups. He is the first responder consultant to a six-state Smartgrid Collaboratory for the Bonneville Power Administration sponsored by the NSA. 

He has served as the Deputy Director for Strategic Initiatives for NORCOM911, working with 911 call centers in King County and across Washington State. He lead NORCOM and a coalition of local, regional, and state 911 partners in advancing critical NG911 funding requests in Washington DC. 

Scott served 15 years as the highest-ranking civilian executive (chief of staff) in the King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) and the 12th largest county in the nation. He advised three Sheriffs in this capacity, directing a workforce of 1,100 employees (800 commissioned law enforcement officers), and overseeing an annual budget of nearly $200 million. 
His federal affairs work for the Sheriff secured more than $50 million in grants and direct appropriations, including $5 million in UASI funding for a regional rescue/homeland security helicopter. Scott also worked directly with then-Sheriff Dave Reichert and Washington State’s congressional delegation leadership to obtain nearly $1.5 million for emerging DNA testing that ultimately convicted the Green River killer, resolving the decades-old murders of countless young women in the Pacific Northwest. He was appointed to work on policy development for then-Vice President Gore’s SafeCities Coalition, Project Safe Neighborhoods with the Bush administration, and the National Meth Training and Technical Assistance Center. He managed project liaison relationships with the U.S. Attorney General, the White House, Congress, FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, DEA, the National Sheriff’s Association, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Scott was instrumental in developing Title IV legislation with Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn to increase funding for School Resource Officers and expand PAL and other youth activities into diverse and underserved communities in King County. He also authored legislation to eliminate the federal exclusions related to managing non-violent, mentally ill offenders in America’s local jails. 

Scott has an extensive private-sector background in marketing communications and management consulting. He has advised national and international clients, including the Walt Disney Company, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Britannica, and ESPN, where he helped design and launch the first-ever ESPN X-Games.

He has a strong global focus and perspective through his international work and engagement. As co-founder of Asianet Marketing Resources, Scott has worked extensively in Asian American communities, providing counsel to former U.S. Ambassador to China, U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary, and Washington State Governor Gary Locke; Gates Foundation Director Martha Choe; and the South Korean Consular and National Advisor, among others. He has also collaborated with RTE, the Irish national broadcast company. Working with then-U.S. Ambassador Jean Kennedy-Smith and the Irish Minister of the Gaeltacht and Ireland’s current President Michael D. Higgins, he brought first-time Irish programming to the United States, including the Dublin St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which had never before been broadcast in the U.S. 

In the nonprofit sector, Scott serves as a top executive and strategist with Crime Stoppers Global Solutions. He served as Friends of Athletic Fields co-founder and president in Washington State, where he organized, managed, and led a statewide grassroots advocacy group that generated over $120 million for youth and adult sports, recreation, and athletic fields and facilities. He negotiated and secured a $10-million contribution via enabling legislation for Seattle’s new football stadium from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that funded a statewide Youth Sports Facilities Grant that continues today. He helped reinstitute middle school sports and successfully lobbied to change the maintenance and customer service model for Seattle Parks so that crews were working and bathrooms were open on the weekend and at night when the community used the parks. 

Other board positions have included Washington Dollars for Scholars, the Rainier Institute (public policy), Seattle University Criminal Justice Advisory Council, The Firearms Crime Enforcement Coalition (FACE), ASIS Puget Sound, Seattle Athletic Facilities & Education Committee (S.A.F.E.), Project Safe Neighborhoods Funding Committee, and the Washington State and Governor’s Meth Initiative.

Scott has a Ph.D. in Applied Management & Decision Sciences, specializing in Leadership and Organizational Change, and an MBA with an emphasis on Organizational Behavior.

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