Technical Biography

Robert K. Cunningham
Lincoln Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Information Systems Technology Group
244 Wood Street
Lexington, MA 02420-9108
voice: 781-981-2584
fax: 781-981-0186
email: rkc@ll.mit.edu

 

Robert K. Cunningham is the associate leader of the Information Systems Technology Group and is responsible for initiating and managing research programs in information assurance and evaluations of information assurance systems. Dr. Cunningham received an Sc.B. degree in computer engineering from Brown University in 1985, an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Boston University in 1988, and a Ph.D. degree in cognitive and neural systems from Boston University in 1998. From 1985 to 1987, he worked at Raytheon, designing and developing a parallel and distributed operating system for the next generation weather radar system. After completing his master's degree in 1988, he became a staff member of the Machine Intelligence Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where his research focused on machine learning, digital image processing and image and video understanding. He also developed parallel implementations of algorithms for enhanced visualization and image region classification and contributed to early drafts of the real-time message passing interface (MPI/RT) specification. In early 1998 he moved to the Information Systems Technology Group, where he started researching and developing intrusion detection systems that do not require advance knowledge of the method of attack. His interests broadened to include detection and analysis of malicious software, including computer worms. Most recently he has become interested in automatically detecting software faults in mission critical software. In all cases he has been interested in evaluating the performance of these systems.

In 2001 Dr. Cunningham led the research working group for the NSA’s computer network defense research and technology transition program manager, and received a commendation for his work from the director. In 2002 he participated in a study for DARPA developing a research program to detect and quarantine computer worms. In 2004 he was elected to the executive committee of the Institute for Information Protection (I3P), and later that year he was appointed to the executive advisory board for the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) organization. In 2005 and 2006, Dr. Cunningham managed the research team of a multi-institution effort to secure process control systems for the I3P and DHS. Dr. Cunningham is a member of the editorial board of the IEEE Security and Privacy magazine, is a member of Sigma Xi and a senior member of the IEEE.

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