Laura Albert

10:10 am
322 Fryklund Hall

Abstract

In this talk, Professor Laura Albert will discuss how to protect critical information technology (IT) infrastructure using industrial and systems engineering methods. Critical IT infrastructure is vulnerable to risks that can be introduced from supply chains, and therefore, there is a need to design plans to mitigate these risks. In this research, we propose new optimization models and network interdiction models to identify a combination of cost-effective mitigations that maximally delay supply chain attacks when there exist multiple adversaries and that capture the interaction between a defender and multiple attackers. We propose network interdiction models for protecting critical infrastructure that prioritizes cost-effective security mitigations to maximally delay adversarial attacks. We consider attacks originating from multiple adversaries, each of which aims to find a “critical path” through the attack surface to complete the corresponding attack as soon as possible.

Bio

Dr. Laura Albert is the Assistant Dean for Graduate Affairs in the College of Engineering and an Associate Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests are in operations research with a particular focus on applications in homeland security and emergency response. She writes the blog “Punk Rock Operations Research.”

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