Moving Forward
Science and technology are constantly changing, and Lab V2 is designed to embody that change. While previous organizations that I helped start (CySIS and CYR3CON) had great impact for their time, these organizations were designed to address the unanswered challenges of their day. The focus of those organizations related to challenges in the realms of social media and cyber security. However today I feel that there are pressing problems in other domains such as explainable AI, ML operations, medicine, sustainability, and the supply chain. That said, I am very grateful to all the people who worked with me to get those organizations started, and we accomplished a lot. The work at CySIS and CYR3CON set a high bar for Lab V2 to attain. – Paulo Shakarian
The CySIS Lab 2014-2020
The CySIS (Cyber-Socio Intelligent Systems) Lab at Arizona State University from 2014-2020. The Lab had several notable accomplishments, including:
- Over $3M in research funding in 4 years
- Lab members all went on to top-tier jobs in academia and industry including Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, and faculty positions
- Several junior lab members continued their education received scholarships for Masters and Doctoral studies at both ASU and other universities
- Media coverage in major news outlets such at the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Tech Crunch, The Economist and others
- Multiple awards including best paper at several conferences, awards for venture/startup competitions, and other accolades
- Over a dozen patents now published, four now issued, multiple inventions licensed
- Four books published with student authors, dozens of papers
While there were many people who worked in CySIS from various roles, including professional volunteers bringing industry experience, paid consultants, and students at all levels, including high school, undergraduate, and masters level, we frequently are asked about our Ph.D. graduates, who are listed below.
- Hamid Alvari (Ph.D., Computer Science, successfully defended in 2020, graduated in 2020, currently at Google Research)
- Understanding Propagation of Malicious Information Online
- Ericsson Marin (Ph.D., Computer Science, ASU, successfully defended in 2020, graduated in 2020, currently an Assistant Professor at CalPoly Pomona)
- A Hacker-Centric Perspective to Empower Cyber Defense
- Elham Shaabani (Ph.D., Computer Science, ASU, successfully defended in 2019, graduated in 2019, now at Microsoft (LinkedIn))
- Data Driven Inference in Populations of Agents
- Mohammed Almukaynizi (Ph.D., Computer Science, successfully defended in 2019, graduated in 2019, now at King Saud University)
- Proactive Identification of Cybersecurity Threats using Online Sources
- Soumajyoti Sarkar (Ph.D., Computer Science, successfully defended in 2020, graduated in 2020, currently a scientist at Amazon)
- Measuring the Impact of Social Network Interactions
- Eric Nunes (Ph.D., Computer Engineering, ASU, successfully defended in 2018, graduated in 2019, now at PayPal)
- Reasoning about Cyber Threat Actors
CYR3CON (Cyber Reconnaissance, Inc.) 2016-2022
CYR3CON was co-founded and led by Paulo Shakarian (CEO) and Jana Shakarian (CTO). The goal of the company was to commercialize exploit prediction technology originally developed at the CySIS Lab. The company sold a SaaS-based platform that combined intelligence automatically mined from over 1,300 websites spanning deepweb, darkweb, open sources, and social media to feed a supervised machine learning approach to predict which software vulnerabilities would be exploited. It was the first such solution on the market and later replicated by other companies in the industry. Cyber Reconnaissance raised over $8 million in venture capital, received multiple government grants, had over 80 paying customers – including several major Fortune 500 firms, and boasted zero down time from 2018 until acquisition in January, 2022. The company was acquired by Cyber Security Works in early 2022.
Please note that Paulo Shakarian, Jana Shakarian, and Lab V2 personnel are no longer associated with CYR3CON and not associated with Cyber Security Works. Any further inquiries relating to the current status of CYR3CON and its products should be referred to Cyber Security Works.