By Dr. Luqi, Professor, NPS Department of Computer Science

The 20th Monterey Workshop on Cyber was held on Nov. 27-29, 2018. NPS Provost Steve Lerman, Cyber Academic Group Chair Dan Boger, and Dean of Research Jeff Paduan chaired the workshop, and led the workshop program committee with members from several departments, including computer science, electrical and computer engineering, information sciences, operations research and national security affairs.

The first of two workshop panels discussed the establishment of a Monterey Cyber Institute in depth. The second panel on Cyber Education exchanged concepts and scopes including large cyber programs with more than 4,500 students in the nation, with panel members from the Naval Academy and University of Texas at San Antonio.

The workshop solicited innovative solutions to cyber problems with an achievable path to cyber security assurance at all levels of systems. All at the workshop worked together on innovations for cyber problem solving in both classified and unclassified sessions. Participants explored how machine learning, big data analysis, secure software/hardware architectures, artificial intelligence (AI), and other science methods enable the cyber workforce to integrate security, counter insider threats, and conduct cyber operations.

The Monterey Workshop series has been an influential forum for aligning scientific research and innovations among academia, industry, and government sponsoring agencies since 1991. The overarching theme is increasing the practical impact of scientific methods in computer science and engineering of software intensive systems. There is an urgent national need to provide software intensive systems that operate dependably in today’s contested computing environments. Given the state of industry, there are obvious challenges to fully secure functioning cyber systems. Leading computer scientists, software and system engineers in government, academia, cyber agencies and computer industry participated.

Steering committee member, Stanford Computer Science pioneer Prof. Zohar Manna (1939-2018) was honored at the workshop. He was a long-standing workshop participant along with a joint effort on increasing the practical impact of theoretical computer science that today helps form the basis for artificial intelligence and reliable software, and underpins advances in cyber.

NPS collaborated with his theorem prover and temporal logic for specification-based, real-time rapid prototyping to remove requirement errors and then link to program synthesis to prevent implementation errors. More in depth study is planned for the 21st Monterey Workshop in Artificial Intelligence.