Research - Computer Science
Computer Science Research
Much of our research is multidisciplinary, involving students and faculty from mathematics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and physics. Our research environment is unique in its blend of theory and practice, and with students' determination to put their thesis results into practice. Many of our student theses have led to publications in major conferences and frequent best-paper awards. Major focus areas are: Cyber Security and Defense, Computer Networks, Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Systems, Data Science, and Software Engineering. .
Cyber Security and Defense (CSD)
Provides knowledge in all areas of Information Security (INFOSEC) and develops the necessary skills for those who will be involved in development, evolution, or implementation of secure computer systems.
Provides fundamental and advanced knowledge in network architecture and system software for real-time and multicomputer systems and in the rapidly growing areas of wireless networking, mobile devices, and related topics, including mobile computing and wireless security.
Artificial Intelligence and Data Science
Provides knowledge of machine learning and symbolic AI including deep learning, natural language processes including LLMs, vision, robotics, data governance, decision science and decision support, and ontology.
Provides an understanding of artificial intelligence and human factors techniques for creating highly capable software agents that interact effectively with human users.
Provides knowledge of all aspects of software development and develops skills needed to efficiently and reliably implement military systems and application software using the best available tools and techniques.
Partners
Pease, A., (2025). Modal and Higher Order Logical Reasoning with SUMO. in Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Tracy Holloway King, Stephen Pulman & Annie Zaenen (eds.), Semantics at the Crossroads: From Theoretical Explorations to Implementations, 165-186. Konstanz: PubliKon.
Richard Thompson, Adam Pease, Angelos Toutsios, Roberto Milanese Jr. and Jarrad Singley, 鈥淔ormalizing Natural Language: Cultivating LLM Translations Using Automated Theorem Proving" EuroProofNet workshop "Theorem Proving and Machine Learning in the age of LLMs: SoA and Future Perspectives", Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
M. Litton, D. Drusinsky, and J. B. Michael, 鈥淒iscovering Decision Manifolds to Assure Trusted Autonomous Systems,鈥� IEEE Systems Journal, 2025.
Dr. Armon Barton published a journal paper in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security: "PredicTor: A Global, Machine Learning Approach to Tor Path Selection" by Armon Barton, Tim Walsh, Mohsen Imani, Jiang Ming, and Matt Wright.
C. Daniel, D. Drusinsky, and L. E. Peitso, Multiagent Aircraft Flight Route Planning in a 3D Threat-Contested Environment Using Cross-Entropy Search, in Computer, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 130-146, April 2025.
N. C. Rowe, G. Lipow, A. Ghosh, and L. Yallapragada, Testing effects of potential adversary manipulations of ship-tracking data. CSCI-RCTW (International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, Research Track on Cyber Warfare, Cyber Defense, and Cyber Security), December 2024.
An encyclopedia chapter of Professor Neil Rowe鈥檚 was published. N. C. Rowe, Cyber deception. Chapter in Encyclopedia of Cryptography, Security, and Privacy, 3rd edition, ed. S. Jagodia, P. Samarati, and M. Young, Springer Berlin, Heidelberg, 2025, pp. 491-494. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27739-9_1766-1
鈥淐ryptography is Rocket Science: Analysis of BPSec鈥�, a journal article by PhD student LT Xisen Tian, Professor Britta Hale, and collaborators at Sheffield University and Kings College London was published in Communications in Cryptography.
NPS graduate LtCol Mathieu Couillard and Professor Britta Hale published a paper on 鈥淭he Role of Deceptive Defense in Cyber Strategy: Lessons from Decoy Vessels of the Great War鈥� in the NMIOTC MIO Journal, a NATO maritime proceedings.
NIWC provided new FY25 funding ($75K) for Professor Geoff Xie to continue my technical support for their joint tactical edge network (JTEN) development, which is a part of Project Overmatch. He is advising LCDR Luke Chapman (USN) to investigate some of the research questions.
FA-R Thuy Nguyen presented a paper co-authored by her thesis student Mr. Meng Wee Song and Distinguished Professor Cynthia Irvine entitled "A Zero Trust Architecture for Critical Operational Technology Systems" at the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS).
FA-R Thuy Nguyen presented a paper co-authored by her thesis student Army Capt Andrew Sill and Professor Neil Rowe entitled "A Resilient Dual-Purpose Web Honeypot for Analyzing Attacks on Industrial Control Systems" at the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS).
Dr. Armon Barton published a journal paper co-authored by his students Blake Hayden and Tim Walsh entitled "Defending Against Deep Learning-Based Traffic Fingerprinting Attacks with Adversarial Examples" in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security.
Drs. Patrick McClure and Marko Orescanin had a paper titled, "Turn Down the Noise: Perceptually Constrained Attacks for Multi-Label Audio Classification" accepted to the International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications.
LtCol Mathieu Couillard (co-author Dr. Britta Hale) made a research paper presentation on deceptive cyber operations for network defense at the NATO NMIOTC Cybersecurity Conference in Chania, Crete.
FA-R Thuy Nguyen and her co-authors have two accepted papers, which will be presented at the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) in January 2025. Mr. Song (Singapore) and Capt Sill (USA) are graduated master's students.
Meng Wee Song, Thuy D. Nguyen, Cynthia E. Irvine, "A Zero Trust Architecture for Critical Operational Technology Systems"
Andrew D. Sill, Thuy D. Nguyen, Neil C. Rowe, "A Resilient Dual-Purpose Web Honeypot for Analyzing Attacks on Industrial Control Systems"
Assistant Professor Armon Barton presented a paper co-authored by his thesis student LT Matthew Straughn and Research Associate Bruce Allen entitled "Detecting Malware Traffic with Graph Neural Networks" at The 2024 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, & Applied Computing (CSCE'24).
CS PhD student CDR Christopher Landis presented a paper, 鈥淢itigating Inference Risks with the NIST Privacy Framework鈥� (Landis, Christopher B., and Joshua A. Kroll. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (2024:1).)
LT Michael Williams and Professor Neil Rowe presented a paper, 鈥淩ussian Disinformation Campaigns and Possible Countermeasures鈥� at the 24th International Conference on Security and Management, Las Vegas, NV, US, July 2024.
Professor Peter Denning has published a book, 鈥淣avigating a Restless Sea: Mobilizing Innovation Adoption in Your Community鈥�, co-authored with Todd W Lyons. The book has been published by Waterside Productions.
Richard Thompson, Adam Pease, Angelos Toutsios, Roberto Milanese Jr. and Jarrad Singley (2025) "Formalizing Natural Language: Cultivating LLM Translations Using Automated Theorem Proving", EuroProofNet workshop "Theorem Proving and Machine Learning in the age of LLMs: SoA and Future Perspectives" to be held in April in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK (accepted, to appear).
A one-page description of research by Adam Pease and LT Jack Timberlake appeared in the February issue of the trade publication Seaways, under the byline of Capt Alexandra Hagerty, entitled "COLREGs compliance for MASS"
Professor Joshua Kroll presented a seminar, 鈥淯nsafe at any AUC: Unlearned Lessons from Sociotechnical Disasters for Responsible AI鈥� at SRI International鈥檚 Computer Science Laboratory.
B. Hale. Escaping the Innovation Bunker. In Proceedings of U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) 2021.
C. Cremers, B. Hale, K. Kohbrok. The Complexities of Healing in Secure Group Messaging: Why Cross-Group Effects Matter. In Proceedings of USENIX 2021.
B. Dowling and B. Hale. Secure Messaging Authentication against Active Man-in-the-Middle Attacks. In Proceedings of IEEE EuroS&P 2021.
B. Hale, D. J. Van Bossuyt, N. Papakonstantinou, and O鈥橦alloran. A Zero-Trust Methodology for Security of Complex Systems With Machine Learning Components. In Proceedings of the ASME 2021 IDETC/CIE2021.
M. Sjoholmsierchio, B. Hale, D. Lukaszewski, and G. Xie. Strengthening SDN Security: Protocol Dialecting and Downgrade Attacks. In IEEE NetSoft. 2021.
N. Papakonstantinou, D. J. Van Bossuyt, J. Linnosmaa, B. Hale, B. and O鈥橦alloran. A Zero Trust Hybrid Security and Safety Risk Analysis Method. In Proceedings of the Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering (JCISE) 2021.
D. Brutzman, T. Norbraten, J. Culbert, and B. Hale. Blockchain Mergence for Distributed Ledgers Supporting Fleet Logistics and Maintenance. In Acquisition Research Symposium 2021.
M. Troncoso and B. Hale. The Bluetooth CYBORG: Analysis of the Full Human-Machine Passkey Entry AKE Protocol. In NDSS 2021.
D. Drusinsky, Who Is Authenticating My E-Commerce Logins? Computer 54 (04), 49-54.
P. Denning, D. Drusinsky, J. B. Michael, Military Intelligent Systems Pose Strategic Dilemmas, In Proceedings of U.S. Naval Institute, Vol. 147/4/1,418 April 27, 2021
Kroll, J.A., 2021, March. Outlining Traceability: A Principle for Operationalizing Accountability in Computing Systems. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 758-771).
J. A. Kroll, J. B. Michael, D. B. Thaw. 鈥�Enhancing Cybersecurity via Artificial Intelligence: Risks, Rewards, and Frameworks鈥�, Computer, June 2021.
T. Carter, J. B. Michael, J. A. Kroll, 鈥�Lessons Learned from Applying the NIST Privacy Framework鈥�, IT Professional, July 2021.
Blais, C., "Extending the Command and Control System to Simulation System Interoperation (C2SIM) Standard to Address Exchange of Cybersecurity Information," 2021-SIW-010, Simulation Innovation Workshop, Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization. February 2021.
Blais, C., Dechand, M., Dembach, M., and Singapogu, S., "The Use of Automated Reasoning with the Command and Control System to Simulation System Interoperation (C2SIM) Standard," 2021-SIW-010, Simulation Innovation Workshop, Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization, February 2021.
Brett Rajchel, John V. Monaco, Gurminder Singh, Angela Hu, Jarrod Shingleton and Thomas Anderson. Temporal Behavior in Network Traffic as a Basis for Insider Threat Detection. 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI 2020).
Alejandro Acien, John V. Monaco, Aythami Morales, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Julian Fierrez. TypeNet: Scaling up Keystroke Biometrics. 2020 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2020).
Aythami Morales, Alejandro Acien, Julian Fierrez, John V. Monaco, Ruben Tolosana, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Javier Ortega-Garcia. Keystroke Biometrics in Response to Fake News Propagation in a Global Pandemic. 2020 IEEE Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2020).
John V. Monaco, Ryad B Benosman. General Purpose Computation with Spiking Neural Networks: Programming, Design Principles, and Patterns. 2020 Neuro-inspired Computational Elements Workshop (NICE 2020).
John V. Monaco. Bug or Feature? Covert Impairments to Human Computer Interaction. 2020 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020).
Kroll, Joshua A. 鈥�Accountability in Computer Systems鈥� In Oxford Handbook of the Ethics of AI, Markus Dubber, Frank Pasquale, and Sunit Das, Eds. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Matthew Timmerman, Amela Sadagic, and Cynthia E. Irvine, 鈥�Peering Under the Hull: Enhanced Decision Making via an Augmented Environment.鈥� IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces - IEEE VR 2020, Atlanta, GA, USA, March 2020, DOI:
Kayla N. Afanador and Cynthia E. Irvine, Representativeness in the Benchmark for Vulnerability Analysis Tools (B-VAT). In 13th USENIX Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET 20). USENIX Association. https://www. Usenix.org/conference/cset20/presentation/afanador
L. E. Peitso and J. B. Michael, 鈥�The Promise of Interactive Shared Augmented Reality,鈥� Computer, vol. 53, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 45-52
D. Drusinsky and J. B. Michael, 鈥�Obtaining Trust in Executable Derivatives Using Crowdsourced Critiques with Blind Signatures,鈥� Computer, vol. 53, no. 4, April 2020, pp. 51-56
J. B. Michael, G. W. Dinolt, and D. Drusinsky, 鈥�Open Questions in Formal Methods,鈥� Computer, vol. 53, no. 5, May 2020, pp. 81-84
J. B. Michael, R. Kuhn, and J. Voas, 鈥�Cyberthreats in 2025,鈥� Computer, vol 53, no. 6, June 2020, pp. 16-27.
J. B. Michael, R. Kuhn, and J. Voas, 鈥�Security or Privacy: Can You Have Both?鈥� Computer, vol. 53, no. 9, Sept. 2020, pp. 20-30.
S. Miller, C. Blais, and J. Green, Modeling the Operational Value of Data Fusion on ASW and Other Missions, Technical Report NPS-IS-20-004, 黑料吃瓜网, Oct. 2020.
P. Denning and D. Denning. Dilemmas of artificial intelligence. Communications of ACM 63, 3 (March 2020), 26-28.
P. Denning. Technology Adoption (with Ted Lewis). Communications of ACM 63, 6 (June 2020), 27-29.
P. Denning. Avalanches make us all innovators. Communications of ACM 63, 9 (September 2020), 32-34.
P. Denning. Navigating in real-time environments (with Jim Selman). Communications of ACM 63, 12 (December 2020), 26-28.
T. D. Nguyen, S. C. Austin, and C. E. Irvine, 鈥�A strategy for security testing industrial firewalls,鈥� in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Industrial Control System Security (ICSS) Workshop, ICSS, (New York, NY, USA), pp. 38鈥�47, Association for Computing Machinery, December 2019.
P. Denning and Ted Lewis. Uncertainty. In Best Writings in Mathematics 2020, (Mircea Pitici, ed.) Princeton University Press 2020. Original paper in Communications of ACM 62, 12 (Dec 2019), 26-28.
Luckie, Matthew, Robert Beverly, Ryan Koga, Ken Keys, Joshua A. Kroll, and K. Claffy. "Network hygiene, incentives, and regulation: deployment of source address validation in the Internet." In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 465-480. 2019.
Computer Science Department
Address: Computer Science Dept., Glasgow Hall East, Building 305, Room 311, 1411 Cunningham Rd, Monterey, CA, 93943
Phone: Admin: 831.656.3389, DSN 756-, Program Office: 831.656.7980/7981, DSN 756-.
Fax: Admin: 831. 656.2814, DSN 756-, Program Office:831.656.3681, DSN 756-
Email: The following email addresses can be reached using the '@nps.edu' suffix: Chairman - CS_Chair, Program Officer - ProgramOfficer_CS, Computer Science Academic Associate - AcademicAssociate_CS, Software Engineering Academic Associate - AcademicAssociate_SE, Computer Science Search Committee - cssrch, Additional contact information is available for CS Department faculty members.