An information technology expert with an academic background, Matthew Levy of Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (NIWC Pacific) comes to HDSI as part of an Industry Partner Alliance (IPA) Fellowship to work directly with faculty and students.
Over the next 2 years. Dr. Levy will be stationed at HDSI’s campus headquarters partnering on research and academic projects. His fellowship goal is helping find answers for projects fulfilling needs of the U.S. Navy, and learning more about the latest data science tools to bring back to NIWC. Since starting on campus in late spring 2019, he has been stationed at HDSI headquarters in the Supercomputer Center-249E, working on problems in the cybersecurity domain.
Dr. Levy is one of multiple Fellows working with HDSI’s Industry Partnership, an Institute program aimed at strengthening collaboration between working industry professionals and front-line academic researchers and students to work on real-world problems. Coordinating the IPA program is HDSI’s Industry Relations Manager Erik Mjoen, who helps facilitate working partnerships.
“This is a perfect environment for coming out of academia and industry, to get the chance to work directly with researchers on the forefront of the discipline, and getting involved with students who are so excited about the future,” said Dr. Levy. He hopes to build up more core competencies in data science to bring back to NIWC Pacific, and also work closely on recruitment and interaction with data science students, setting up events like hackathons, and running scenarios using game theory.
Dr. Levy also enjoys returning to a campus setting. Before joining NIWC Pacific, Dr. Levy was an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University, and at Hawaiʻi Pacific University, teaching and researching in the areas of open source and data analytics, and running the Master of Science in Information Systems program. He has also worked in private industry as a software engineer, CEO, and CTO in the defense, homeland security, and travel and tourism industries. He earned his Ph.D. in information systems from Louisiana State University, and an MBA from San Diego State University.
Among the projects he’s working on now is in the area cyber-deception, in analyzing how hackers behave in cyberspace, what they do when faced with deception and deterrent mechanisms, and the efficacy of the deception mechanisms themselves. The hope is that he can work at the crossroads of technology and human behavior with the researchers at UCSD to improve upon this work. In his words, my hope during my time as an industry fellow at HSDI is to bring novel thinking and research to NIWC Pacific to help us solve some of our nation’s most pressing problems in the cyber domain.”
