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for “Outstanding research contribution in computational intelligence and its applications in energy related problems, network security and infrastructure protection, and robotics”.

IEEE IES 2012 J. David Irwin Early Career Award

University of Idaho, 2008 – 2009 Academic Year

Best Young Faculty Award

The Brain Korea 21 Chungbuk Information Technology Center at Chungbuk National University, 2008

Fellow of the Outstanding Foreign Scholar Program

Building Energy Management Systems: The Age of Intelligent and Adaptive Buildings

Mining Building Energy Management System Data Using Fuzzy Anomaly Detection and Linguistic Descriptions

FN-DFE: Fuzzy-Neural Data Fusion Engine for Enhanced Resilient State-Awareness of Hybrid Energy Systems

Cyber-Physical System Security With Deceptive Virtual Hosts for Industrial Control Networks

Autonomic Intelligent Cyber-Sensor to Support Industrial Control Network Awareness

Computational Intelligence Techniques (Machine Learning) with Applications in Energy  Cybersecurity and Human Machine Interfaces

Software Defined Networks

Fuzzy Neural Data Mining Techniques

Energy Security

Human-machine Interfaces

Modern Heuristics Research Group website

AI in Cybersecurity: Balancing Digital Transformation and Trust - Ep. 23

Cybersecurity system evolves as it watches and learns from would-be hackers

INL takes four R&D 100 Awards at annual banquet

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Students in VCU Engineering's VR lab.

VCU virtual reality lab opens to awe of crowd

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AI advancements raise questions

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Bull’s-eye on small business Experts say hackers are preying on unprotected targets

Milos Manic, Ph.D., Strengthens Computer Science Department with over $300K Funding

cybersecurity-expert-aims-to-protect-the-power-grid-by-hacking-wouldbe-hackers

Professor of Computer Science

  For hackers, the U.S. energy grid is a treasure trove of classified information with vast potential for profit and mayhem. To be effective, the power grid’s protection system has to be a bit like a hacker: highly intelligent, agile and able to learn rapidly. Milos Manic, Ph.D., professor of computer science and director of VCU’s Cybersecurity Center, along with colleagues at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), has developed a protection system that improves its own effectiveness as it watches and learns from those trying to break into the grid. The team’s Autonomic Intelligent Cyber Sensor (AICS) received an R&D 100 Award for 2018, a worldwide recognition of the year’s most promising inventions and innovations.  “An underground war of many years” Manic calls foreign state actors’ ongoing attempts to infiltrate the power grid — and efforts to thwart them — “an underground war of many years.” These criminals aim to enter critical infrastructures such as energy systems to disrupt or compromise codes, screens login information and other assets for future attacks. The nightmare result would be an infrastructure shutdown in multiple locations, a so-called “Black Sky” event that would erase bank accounts, disable cell phones and devastate the economy. In that scenario, engineers would have less than 72 hours to restore the grid before batteries, food supplies, medicine and water run out.  With high stakes and increasingly sophisticated attackers, artificial intelligence and machine learning are key to respond to the challenges of protecting the grid’s interconnected systems, according to Manic. “Hackers are much smarter than in the past. They don’t necessarily look at one particular component of the system,” Manic said. “Often they can fool the system by taking control of the behavior of two different components to mask their attack on a third.” A nervous system for the power grid Using artificial intelligence algorithms, AICS can look holistically at an array of interconnected systems including the electrical grid and adapt continually as attacks are attempted. It is inspired by the body’s autonomic nervous system, the largely unconscious functions that govern breathing, circulation and fight-or-flight responses. Once installed, AICS acts as a similar “nervous system” for a power grid, silently monitoring all of its components for unusual activity — and learning to spot threats that were unknown when it was first installed.  To “hack” the hacker, AICS often deploys honeypots, shadow systems that appear to be legitimate parts of the grid but that actually divert, trap and quarantine malicious actors. These honeypots allow asset owners to gather information that can help identify both a threat and a potentially compromised system. “Honeypots can make a hacker think he has broken into a real system,” Manic said. “But if the hacker sees that the ‘system’ is not adequately responding, he knows it’s a honeypot.” For this reason, the system’s honeypots are also intelligently updating themselves. Manic developed AICS with his INL colleagues Todd Vollmer, Ph.D., and Craig Rieger, Ph.D. Vollmer was Manic’s Ph.D. student at the University of Idaho. The AICS team formed eight years ago, and Manic continued to work on the project when he came to VCU in 2014. He holds a joint appointment with INL.   

Cybersecurity expert aims to protect the power grid by hacking would-be hackers

Researchers in VCU’s Modern Heuristics Lab are developing intelligent algorithms that can be used for a world of purposes - from making busses more energy efficient to driving robots with thought.

Modern Heuristics Research Group

Provided to the VCU College of Engineering with permission to upload by NewsPoint360.

Dr. Milos Manic - NewsPoint360 Interview

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