Fall C3E Workshop Participants:

We look forward to your participation at this year's C3E Workshop. Please note that we will be departing the hotel on Monday morning, 10 September starting at 07:50am for a short bus ride into the West Point campus. Only our Monday morning session will be held on thecampus. All other C3E Workshop sessions will originate from the Eisenhower Room with The Thayer Hotel. By regulation, you will need a government issued photo ID such as a driver's license, Monday morning for the bus ride through the West Point gate.

Also, if you are signed up to attend the Culinary Institute of America (CIS) dinner on Tuesday evening, please have $75 in cash to get your ticket. The C3E staff will be available Sunday evening at the reception in The Thayer Hotel's Eisenhower Room to assist with CIA dinner tickets.

See you at West Point!

Welcome to the C3E Workshop Website!

SCORE Committee Chair, Brad Martin, cordially invites you to participate in the 2012 C3E Workshop, 10-12 September at the Thayer Conference Center, West Point, NY. SCORE is centered upon conducting coordination and planning activities across the Intelligence Community (IC), coordinating activities to bridge the IC classified and unclassified research communities.  Additional SCORE activity is focused upon increasing awareness of and insight into cyber-related research and development, with the goal of compelling a new way of operating and doing business – promoting a “leap ahead” in cyber capability.

This will be the fourth annual meeting designed to develop novel analytic solutions to the rapidly changing cybersecurity landscape.  We gathered in 2009 to understand the extent to which adversaries have been able to persistently insinuate themselves into our systems and networks, and the extent to which computational power could be leveraged to mitigate or eliminate their influence.  In 2010, we gathered to understand how state-of-the-art models and data practices could inform both strategy and tactics for the cyber security practitioner.  Last year, we looked through the frameworks of intersecting anomalies and emergent behavior to understand their roles in creating a predictive analytic capability in support of exquisite intelligence and anticipatory cyberspace actions.   The extraordinary value of the C3E community of interest was demonstrated this past Spring, as we gathered a subset of C3E to address a hypothetical time-sensitive challenge problem. 

This year, as always, we will gather a diverse set of experts in creative collaboration to tackle these tough intellectual challenges and point toward novel and practical solutions.  You have been identified as an expert who will make critical contributions to this discussion, whether because of your expertise in understanding cyberspace threats, applying state-of-the art analytic methods and models, or in the exploration of big data.   Your full participation throughout the workshop will be indispensable to its success.  Your contribution to the success of the workshop will consist of some preparatory reading and active engagement in one or more of the substantive tracks. 

This year, we will emphasize risk management and decision making in cyberspace by continuing to explore novel and predictive analytic approaches and visualization techniques.  Among the specific topics we wish to explore at the workshop are the following:

--Decision-making and risk management:  The ability to estimate the occurrence of future events using expertise, observation and intuition is critical to the human decision-making process. From a biophysical perspective, there is strong evidence that the neocortex provides a basic framework for memory and prediction in which human intelligence emerges as a process of pattern storage, recognition and projection rooted in our experience of the world and driven by perception and creativity. The human decision making can therefore be seen as a situation-action matching process which is context-bound and driven by experiential knowledge and intuition. However, despite the natural disposition of humans towards prediction, our ability analyze, to forecast and respond to plausible futures remains one of the greatest intelligence challenges because of limitations on human reasoning due to cognitive and cultural biases. The objective of track discussions will center on how to assist analysts and policymakers in providing better cybersecurity analysis and response through the enablement of a human-based approach to decision-making that is unhindered by cognitive and cultural biases. The following questions illustrate some of the topics that will be discussed.

• What aspects of decision-making and risk management are unique to cybersecurity?  What are the parallel analytic strengths and pathologies in cyberspace and how do they manifest themselves? 
• How do cognitive and cultural biases affect human decision-making in cybersecurity?
• What methods can be used to reduce human biases that hamper decision-making in cybersecurity?
• Can social intelligence practices such as crowdsourcing and collaborative decision-making aid us in improving human decision-making in identifying and mitigating cyberspace threats?
• How can methods and practices that improve human decision-making be applied by the cybersecurity practitioner?  Are these methods and practices within reach? 
• What technologies can be used to implement these methods and practices? Will these technologies be accepted by cybersecurity practitioners?
• What aspects of social networking can be applied to cybersecurity for predictive analysis or problem solution?

--From Visualization to Perception:  The massive volumes of data being collected in the physical and cyber worlds are dwarfing our abilities to assess, identify, characterize, and prioritize items, objects, and issues of interest.  This is the antecedent of any action designed to anticipate or respond.  New visualization methods, as well as those that help humans respond more effectively, are required, especially to help analysts orient and assess large areas of data.   As we discussed at C3E 2010, effective cybersecurity will have to take advantage of effective use of both humans and machines for the things that they each do best.    Some questions we will explore at the C3E Workshop related to the Visualization and Perception track are the following:  

• What are the emerging “best practices” in visualization for the analyst?  How can they orient, assess, and move around large data sets efficiently and effectively?   How can visualization provide a tool for the analysts to navigate easily through large data sets to explore potential relationships and to develop or validate hypotheses?                  

• What is the role of streaming analytics and other techniques in enhancing perception of cyberspace threats?        

• What is our current scientific understanding of the relationship between visualization and perception in both the human and machine-learning worlds?        

• How can we distinguish between anomalies recognized by machines – often the result of incomplete data or computational errors – and anomalies that merit further investigation or immediate response? 

The workshop, which will include approximately 60 distinguished participants from academia, industry, and government, will convene with a reception at the Thayer Conference Center at West Point on Sunday evening, 9 September and will conclude Wednesday afternoon, 12 September.   The Thayer provides exceptional accommodations and West Point will be an excellent setting for our workshop.   Non-government participant travel and expenses will be covered by the C3E Workshop.  To accept our invitation, please use the Registration for Workshop’12  link at http://www.c3e.info by 12 August.  After registering, you will be provided with travel information and guidelines by the C3E Workshop Coordinators who will gladly work with you to make your travel arrangements and answer any questions you may have about the Workshop.  We look forward to seeing you at West Point, and particularly look forward to your valuable contributions in our efforts to advance the strategic defense of our nation’s cyber infrastructure.

You must be logged in for full funtionality. All invited participants have had accounts set up. If you have forgotten your user ID or password go here and enter your email address. Your ID and a new password will be sent to you immediately.

If you are encountering any difficulties logging in, or if you would like to request access to the site, please contact Katie Dey at katie.dey[at]isisvanderbilt.edu or Lonnie Carey at lonnic[at]ugov.gov for assistance.