Faculty
CTCR Executive Director Clinical Associate Professor, Computer Science
CTCR Executive Director Clinical Associate Professor, Computer Science
Mr. Hutton serves as the Executive Director for the Central Texas Cyber Range and Clinical Associate Professor of Cybersecurity in the Computer Science Department at Baylor University. Prior to coming to Baylor in Fall 2020, Mr. Hutton had a 13+ year career in cybersecurity at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL). Hutton's career has spanned a diverse set of areas including cyber resilience, cyber risk analysis, network situational awareness, network architectures, and end-to-end systems engineering. His most recent position at JHU/APL was Chief Engineering (acting) of a cybersecurity group, in which he was responsible for overseeing the technical quality and direction of that group's cybersecurity projects. Hutton has received industry certifications in the areas of cybersecurity architecture (CISSP-ISSAP), cyber risk (CRISC), penetration testing (CEH, GPEN), cyber incident response (GCIH), forensics analysis (GCFA, GNFA), and reverse engineering (GREM). His diverse training background in both offensive and defensive cybersecurity enable him to think holistically about the problems in the cybersecurity industry.
CTCR Director of Research and Development Professor, Computer Science
CTCR Director of Research and Development Professor, Computer Science
Jeff Donahoo serves as the Director of Research and Development of the Central Texas Cyber Range. He is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Baylor University with academic specializations in cybersecurity and networking. His research centers around secure, large-scale dissemination of data and services. A major impediment to large-scale information access involves the difficulties in handling the burgeoning demands on information dissemination technologies. Unfortunately, deploying critical services at the network layer seems unlikely due to volatile policy and security barriers. One solution to this problem centers on providing appropriate services at the application layer in overlay network topologies. While this approach promises significant improvement in overall scalability for network and system resources, the effective use of such networking services is by no means automatic. Dr. Donahoo's research focuses on the interplay among routing services, transport protocols, and information dissemination problem domains with the intent to develop and point the way to technologies that address the challenge of extending traditional information dissemination applications to a world with ubiquitous information expectations. The need for ubiquity and scalability of such services often stands in conflict the desire to control and secure. Donahoo explores solutions to this juxtaposition of control and scale, including work in enterprise application development, group confidentiality, secure service membership, and more.
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Dr. Pablo Rivas is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Baylor University (formerly at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York). He worked in the industry for a decade as a software engineer before becoming an academic. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, ACM, and SIAM. He was formerly at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. He is an ally of women in technology, a deep learning evangelist, machine learning ethicist, and is a proponent of the democratization of machine learning and artificial intelligence in general. He has peer-reviewed articles for several MDPI, IEEE, and Springer journals related to machine learning. He frequently publishes in top machine learning conferences and workshops such as NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, and ICAI. Dr. Rivas has served as a technical reviewer for the International Conference in Machine Learning (ICML), and ACM's Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT) conference. He teaches machine learning and deep learning courses with applications in natural language processing and computer vision. Dr. Rivas's publications are usually related to machine learning, computer vision, or machine learning ethics. He is an active member of the IEEE Standards Association developing the AI ethics standards, the P7000 series. His recent work includes AI applications in cybersecurity; he has worked on adversarially-robust convolutional neural network models for the detection of DDoS attacks. Most recently he has worked on testing neural-based block-cyphers trained adversarially.
Professor, Computer Science
Professor, Computer Science
Greg Speegle, PhD is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Baylor University. His research background in databases, particularly concurrency control for non-traditional systems, led to work recently in big data analytics, particularly in the optimization of bioinformatics algorithms. Currently, he is working on developing requirements for parallel systems and serial programs to enable automatic generation of parallel programs beyond mapreduce.
Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Liang Dong, PhD is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Baylor University. His unique qualifications include academic specialization in Cyber-Physical System and Security, Sustainable Internet of Things (IoT), and Deep Learning and Data Analysis. IoT allows users to gather data from the physical environment. New information and communication technologies make IoT more scalable and reliable. Dong's recent work focuses on energy-efficient communications and networking, data analysis, and trustworthiness of IoT. Deep neural networks use algorithms, big data, and computing power of digital systems to enable machines to learn quickly, accurately, and on a large scale. Dong's research explores deep-learning methods for applications in mobile communications, network anomaly detection, and information security. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a member of the American Physical Society (APS). He has led research projects from government and industry.
Distinguished Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Distinguished Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Robert J. Marks II is a distinguished professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Baylor University. Marks is the founding director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence and the editor-in-chief of BIO-Complexity. He served as the first President of the IEEE Neural Networks Council, now the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He is a fellow of the IEEE and of the Optical Society of America. Marks' eponyms include the Zhao-Atlas-Marks time-frequency distribution, the Cheung-Marks theorem in Shannon sampling theory and the Papoulis-Marks-Cheung approach in multidimensional signal analysis. He has consulted for Microsoft Corporation, DARPA and Boeing Computer Services. His latest book is Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics co-authored with William Dembski and Winston Ewert.
Assistant Professor, Information Systems & Business Analytics
Assistant Professor, Information Systems & Business Analytics
Daniel Pienta, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics in the School of Business at Baylor University. Dr. Pienta's research in cybersecurity focuses on such topics as trust, phishing, offensive cybersecurity, and the intersection of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, amongst others. Although diverse, he typically takes a behavioral cybersecurity perspective with elements of design science incorporated into his work in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Dr. Pienta uses multiple methods to understand these problems such as lab experiments, field experiments, surveys, focus groups, case studies, and in-depth interviews. Prior to his career in academics, Dr. Pienta consulted some of the largest financial institutions in the United States on due diligence and cybersecurity.
Lecturer, Information Systems & Business Analytics
Lecturer, Information Systems & Business Analytics
Jeff Blake has focused his career helping public and private sector organizations build data and security strategy programs. Currently leading a Global team of Solution Engineers at Nozomi Networks, Jeff is also teaching the Cybersecurity Policy and Planning, and Cyber Warfare courses at the Hankamer School of Business. Jeff enjoys bringing practical, real-world experience to the classroom, and giving students the opportunity to learn first-hand about rapidly evolving topics in Cybersecurity. His areas of interest focus on protecting Critical Infrastructure and Industrial Control Systems.
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Peter Campbell, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts & Sciences at Baylor University. He conducts research in the areas of national and international security. Specifically, he researches the sources of military innovation and their implications for national security and civil-military relations. He also conducts research on cybersecurity, and especially the relationship between attack and defense in cyberspace and the potential advantages of each. Campbell is currently researching the ways in which offensive and defensive actions in cyberspace affect the restoration, strengthening, and building of traditional and non-traditional alliances. He also researches and teaches on the application of ethics in armed conflict, with a particular focus on the just war tradition and how it applies to unconventional forms of conflict, like insurgency and cyberwar. Campbell also studies the origins of grand strategy and the education of strategists. In addition, he researches the extent of policy engagement among academics and how to bridge the gap between academia and policy makers, especially in national security affairs. Some of the finding of this research are available here: Peter Campbell and Michael Desch, "Ranking Relevance: Which Universities Rise and Which Fall in International Relations," New America Foundation, Nov. 27, 2018, https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/ranking-relevance/. Campbell is the author of Military Realism: The Logic and Limits of Force and Innovation in the U.S. Army (University of Missouri Press, 2019) and "Generals in Cyberspace: Military Insights for Defending Cyberspace" (Orbis: The Journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Spring 2018), among other works.
Clinical Assistant Professor, Political Science
Clinical Assistant Professor, Political Science
Richard Jordan, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Baylor University. His research interests include international politics, grand strategy, crisis decision making, emerging technologies (especially autonomous systems and cyber warfare, and mathematical models of (in)equality. His work uses game theory and historical cases to analyze how leaders bargain before, during, and after conflict.