Keynotes

Sheldon H. Jacobson

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The Future of Aviation Security includes Facial Recognition. Are you ready for it?

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is going full throttle on facial recognition, using Credential Authentication Technology (CAT-2) as its platform. With it comes the usual pushback based on personal privacy, including a group of senators who have put forward the Traveler Privacy Protection Act to stop facial recognition use by the TSA for airport security. This talk provides an overview of airport security and how facial recognition fits into the risk-reduction calculus for airport security. A roadmap for the future of airport security is provided that relies heavily on facial recognition (and perhaps other biometrics) that will transform airport security from a process of stopping prohibited items from entering the air system to reducing air system risk by better knowing the population of air travelers and keeping risky passengers from entering the air system.

Bio

Sheldon H. Jacobson is a Founder Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on data-driven risk-based decision-making applied to problems in homeland security, public health, public policy, and sports. His research provided the technical foundations for risk-based security, which led to the development of TSA PreCheck in November 2011. He has received numerous awards for his research, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the IISE David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award, the INFORMS Saul Gass Expository Writing Award, and the INFORMS Presidents Award. He is an elected Fellow of INFORMS, IISE, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Laura Albert

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Smarter Decisions for a Secure World: A Roadmap for Operations Research

Homeland security has gone through a significant transformation since the events of September 11, 2001, and it continues to evolve. In the last 20 years, the operations research community has stepped up to study homeland security and critical infrastructure protection, which has led to many advances. However, recent events have highlighted the enormous number of challenges that remain and require expertise from the operations research community. These topics have been central to my academic research career, which has focused on applying methods from operations research and analytics to applications in aviation security, cyber-security, network restoration, and election resilience. In this talk, I will summarize policy insights from my research and offer guidance into challenges that the research community can tackle, with the goal of motivating new research that can help move homeland security research forward over the next decade.

Bio

Laura Albert, Ph.D., is a Professor and the David Gustafson Department Chair of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was also the 2023 President of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Professor Albert’s research interests are in the field of operations research and analytics with application to homeland security, emergency response, and public sector problems. She has been awarded many honors for her research, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow Award, Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Fellow Award, the INFORMS Impact Prize, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and a Fulbright Award. She is also an engineering ambassador who regularly promotes operations research locally and nationally through media appearances and her blog entitled “Punk Rock Operations Research.”

Keynote Panel-Monday

Climate Security Is National Security

Increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are challenging our infrastructure and collective security as a society. This has created an ongoing need for better methods to understand, predict, and (ideally) control the environmental changes now occurring at local, regional, and even global scales. In this panel discussion, we talk with three experts who are leading significant efforts to combat the threats associated with a changing climate.

Annalise Blum

U.S. Department of the Interior

Bio

Dr. Annalise Blum is a hydrologist with expertise in climate, water and national security policy. She serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water and Science at the U.S. Department of the Interior working closely with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Reclamation. Previously, she served at the U.S. Department of Defense as Senior Advisor for Climate Policy and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow, for which she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service. She has served as a lecturer in Environmental Sciences and Policy and a postdoctoral fellow in Global Change at Johns Hopkins University. Blum has over a decade of experience leading multi-disciplinary research focused on water security, extreme events, and the impacts of climate change and has also worked at the National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the US Geological Survey, and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She holds a Ph.D. in environmental and water resources engineering from Tufts University, M.S. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and B.S. from Stanford University.

Todd Hay

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Bio

Dr. Todd Hay is a program manager in the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) National Security Directorate with more than 25 years of experience leading large national security programs. He currently leads the Department of Defense Environmental Security portfolio, supporting several DoD projects. Previously at PNNL he has been the program manager and chief architect of several large energy and environmental projects. He has also held multiple line management roles with increasing responsibilities resulting in an acting division director role leading 530 staff in data engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, software engineering, and human-centered computing. Prior to PNNL, Todd was an active-duty Air Force intelligence officer, a Principal Information Systems Engineer at The MITRE Corporation, and a Data Program Manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He holds a PhD in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University, a Master of Science in Geographic Information Science from the University of London, and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kimberly Yearick Spangler

Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, Energy Resilience & Optimization

Bio

Dr. Kimberly Yearick Spangler is the Executive Director, SERDP & ESTCP, in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (OUSD(A&S)), Energy Resilience & Optimization. In this position, she provides oversight of all activities of SERDP and ESTCP to develop and demonstrate innovative, cost-effective, and sustainable solutions to meet DoD’s environmental challenges. This includes leading the strategic planning, technical competence, and transition facilitation in the areas of PFAS/AFFF, installation resilience and restoration, corrosion and repair technologies, munitions response, sustainable energetics, and emissions and waste reduction. Prior to her current position, Dr. Spangler served as the Program Manager, Joint Department of Defense/Department of Energy Munitions Program (JMP) in the OUSD(Research & Engineering), Emerging Technologies and was responsible for leading the JMP in developing and exploring advanced munitions concepts and enabling technologies by preeminent scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy Nuclear Weapons Laboratories.

Keynote Panel-Tuesday

Best Practices for Obtaining and Executing Funding in National Security Research

“National Security Research” is a broad topic with myriad opportunities for contribution. In this panel discussion, we talk with three senior program managers at different federal funding agencies about the evolving needs and enduring best practices for conceiving and executing a research agenda in the national security space.

David Phillips

Office of Naval Research

Bio

David Phillips has been a Program Officer at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) since 2020. Prior to joining ONR fulltime in 2022, he spent eleven years as an assistant and associate professor at the United States Naval Academy in the department of mathematics and five years as an assistant professor at the College of William & Mary. At ONR, he oversees the Mathematical and Resource Optimization core programs which aim to develop cutting-edge theory and algorithms for efficiently solving large-scale optimization problems and develop novel models and methods to solve problems of interest to the department of the Navy. In addition, he manages several applied projects developing decision support tools for the Marine Corps and the Navy. He is also a research professor at the University of New Mexico. His research areas are in convex and combinatorial optimization with an emphasis on conic optimization, graph theory, and scheduling. He received a Ph.D. in operations research from the department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University in 2007 and a B.A. in mathematics from Oberlin College in 1997.

Paul Tandy

Defense Threat Reduction Agency

Bio

Paul Tandy, PhD Physics, is a science and technology manager at Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). He manages fundamental R&D programs in the nuclear technologies division (RD NT). He has worked extensively in area the large network collapse, congestion, restoration, recovery, and cascades and has provided technical expertise on these research matters to government, academic, and corporate partners.

Paul L. Yu

U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory

Bio

Paul L. Yu received a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the Program Manager for Information Assurance at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory (DEVCOM ARL) Army Research Office (ARO). This research program concentrates on funding cutting edge research in several domains, primarily conducted at U.S. universities, that enables complex systems to survive and recover from sophisticated adversarial disruption while accomplishing their missions. He has held several technical leadership roles such as Cyber Security Collaborative Research Alliance and The Technical Cooperation Program. His work advances cyber security and signal processing for secure tactical networks and he holds several patents in these areas.

Keynotes

Keynotes

Sheldon H. Jacobson

The Future of Aviation Security includes Facial Recognition. Are you ready for it?

Laura Albert

Smarter Decisions for a Secure World: A Roadmap for Operations Research

Keynote Panel-Monday

Climate Security Is National Security

Annalise Blum

Todd Hay

Kimberly Yearick Spangler

Keynote Panel-Tuesday

Best Practices for Obtaining and Executing Funding in National Security Research

David Phillips

Paul Tandy

Paul L. Yu

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