Professor and Chair, Department of Cyber Security Engineering | Director, Center of Excellence in C5I
Contact Information
Campus: Fairfax
Building: Research Hall 330
Mail Stop: MS 6B1
Personal Websites
Biography
Paulo Costa has applied his significant experience as a fighter pilot to a career specializing in the field of electronic warfare and flight safety, which in conjunction with his research on probabilistic reasoning has led to applications in cyber and transportation security, heterogeneous data fusion, and decision support systems in healthcare, defense, and other areas. These topics are at the core of his classroom activities at both graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as his research path. Costa leads the research of graduate-level students in understanding security objectives and verification protocols, bringing in the science of probabilistic reasoning and challenging PhD-level candidates to consider theory and methods for building computationally efficient software agents that reason, act, and learn in environments characterized by noisy and chaotic traffic.
Costa is a key researcher in the field of probabilistic ontologies and has developed innovative applications and extensions that aid in the fight against cyber-warfare. In addition to his Mason assignments as Chair of the Cyber Security Engineering Department and Director of the C5I Center, Dr. Costa is Vice President for Securing Automation and Supply Chain Security (cymanii.org). He is a former President and current elected member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Information Fusion (isif.org), as well as an IEEE Senior Member (SM13).
Degrees
- PhD, Information Technology, George Mason University
- MS, Systems Engineering, George Mason University
- BS, Engineering, Brazilian Air Force Academy
Research Interests
- Probabilistic Ontologies
- Decision Support Systems
- Cybersecurity
- Information Fusion
- Cyber-Physical Systems Security
Recent Grants
- Cybersecurity Energy and Emissions Quantification Framework, sub-award from DOE’s Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CyManII), 2020-2025.
- Recombinant AI Engineering Seedlings, sub-award from Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security, ODNI.
- Design Space Characterization and Analytical Techniques for Adaptive Kill-Web Analysis, sub-award from Linquest, Inc., DARPA Safe-Sim program.
- DALNIN: Dependency-based Assessment of Litigious Network Events Impacting the Mission, sub-award from VTech, Korean Agency for Defense Development.
Publications
Patents
ADS-Bsec – A Holistic Framework to Secure ADS-B. US Patent No. US11,022,696 B1, Jun 2021