People

Executive Director, L3Harris Institute for Assured Information
L3Harris Chair for Assured Information
Florida Institute of Technology

Marco M. Carvalho is a Professor in Computer Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, in Melbourne, FL/USA. He graduated in Mechanical Engineering from the Federal University of Brasilia, where he also completed his M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering with specialization in dynamic systems. Dr. Carvalho also holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of West Florida and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tulane University, with specialization in Machine Learning and Data Mining. Before joining Florida Tech, Dr. Carvalho served as a Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), where he led research teams in areas including knowledge elicitation and modeling, distributed intelligent systems, tactical communication systems, and human-automation teamwork for cyber operations and defense. During his tenure at IHMC Dr. Carvalho has also led research efforts sponsored by the DoE and DoD on the security of smart buildings, and environmental sensor networks.

At Florida Tech, Dr. Carvalho serves as the Executive Director of the Harris Institute for Assured Information (HIAI), where he leads a number of research efforts on the interactions of humans and autonomous systems for missions critical and cyber operations. He also leads a number of efforts sponsored by the DoD and DHS S&T on Cyber Command and Control, and Federated cybersecurity. Dr. Carvalho currently servers Dean of the College of Engineering and Science, at Florida Tech, leading the academic and research initiatives of and Engineering and Science programs at the Florida Institute of Technology.

Associate Professor
Computer Engineering and Sciences

Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Central Florida, 2003
M.S., Computer Science, University of Central Florida, 1995
B.S., Computer Science, University of Central Florida, 1992

Dr. William Allen is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Florida Institute of Technology, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, performs research on a variety of cybersecurity-related issues and advises graduate students. His dissertation research investigated techniques for the detection of attacks in network traffic and the simulation of network denial-of-service attacks. At Florida Tech, he has served as the major advisor for ten PhD students whose dissertation research focused on such topics as secure software development, cloud security policy, software security metrics, application security, usable security, digital forensics and the coordination and control of a smart home system. He also advised students whose Master’s theses included synthetic attack generation and coordination, detection and mitigation of attacks on mobile devices, detection of emulated environments, automated application testing, peer-to-peer file sharing and IoT security. To date, he has been the author or coauthor of over fifty peer-reviewed publications and one patent. Dr. Allen has led curriculum development for computer science and cybersecurity courses and has taught courses on networking, computer architecture, operating systems and assembly language programming, as well as on computer and network security.

Associate Professor
Computer Engineering and Sciences

Ph.D., Philosophy, Binghamton University, 2012
M.S., Computer Science, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 1987
B.S., Computer Science, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 1986

Tom Eskridge is an Associate Professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Tom has been working to develop tools and techniques to support the capture, organization, and retrieval of knowledge. This work has led to the development of the CmapTools Ontology Editor (COE) for visualizing, browsing, and editing human-understandable ontologies, and several other extensions to CmapTools that are used during knowledge elicitation and subsequent knowledge management. His work on ontology development has enabled current efforts in representing and reasoning about various aspects of cybersecurity and multi-agents systems, and in developing systems for policy representation, reasoning, learning, and application in multi-agent systems.
Tom has also been very involved in performance-oriented information visualization, where the user interface is used to amplify the performance of the system operator. The aircraft cockpit system OZ is a prime example of this work. His other research interests and experience include models of knowledge capture and representation, human analogical reasoning, machine learning, classification, knowledge discovery and data mining,

Associate Professor
Computer Engineering and Sciences

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, 2001

Dr. Michael King joined Florida Institute of Technology’s Harris Institute for Assured Information as a Research Scientist in 2015 and holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences and Cyber Security.
Prior to joining academia, Dr. King served for more than 10 years as a scientific research/program management professional in the United States Intelligence Community. While in government, Dr. King created, directed, and managed research portfolios covering a broad range of topics related to biometrics and identity to include: advanced exploitation algorithm development, advanced sensors and acquisition systems, and computational imaging. He crafted and led the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s (IARPA) Biometric Exploitation Science and Technology (BEST) Program to transition technology deliverables successfully to several Government organizations.
Recognized as an expert in biometrics and identity intelligence, he has been invited to brief the Director of National Intelligence, Congressional staffers and science advisers, Defense Science Board, and Intelligence Science Board. He also served as Intelligence Community Department Lead to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's National Science and Technology Council Subcommittee on Biometrics and Identity Management (2005 – 2012).

Associate Professor
Computer Engineering and Sciences

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, University of Kentucky, 2005
M.S., Electrical Engineering, Iowa State University, 2003
B.S., Electrical and Electronics Engineering, BIT, Mesra, India, 2001

Siddhartha (Sid) Bhattacharyya leads the Assurance for Safety, Security and Intent with Systematic Tactics (ASSIST) lab at Florida Institute of Technology (FIT).
Before joining FIT, he had been a Sr. Research Engineer at Collins Aerospace, Advanced Technology Center where he conducted research as a principal investigator and researcher on research programs with National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA), Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL).
He collaborated with academia and other industry partners in his research efforts. Prior to that, he had been leading efforts in the area of Software Engineering/Formal Methods and developing a new program as a tenured faculty, and Interim Chair of the Division of Computer Science at Kentucky State University. He was a summer research fellow at Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University where he worked on the design, verification, simulation, and synthesis of mission control for autonomous underwater vehicles.
He was also selected as a summer faculty fellow at, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he developed methods for design and analysis of complex smart power grid by applying formal method-based approach. He has published in several referred conferences and journals

Associate Professor
Lieutenant Colonel (Retired), U.S. Army
Computer Engineering and Sciences

Ph.D., Computer Science, NC State University, 2019
M.S., Computer Science, NC State University, 2008
B.S., Computer Science, US Military Academy at West Point, 1999

Dr. O’Connor’s research has centered on computer security with an emphasis on information security education, wireless security, software-defined networking, internet-of-things security, and machine learning approaches for security. He has authored a book in the area and published his research in the proceedings of several academic conferences.
His latest work investigated sensor blinding and state confusion attacks against smart-home internet-of-things devices and was recognized as the best paper for WiSec 2019. Dr. O’Connor served 20 years as an Army Officer, retiring in 2019 at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
His service included an academic appointment to the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the US Military Academy and four assignments supporting the Special Forces, from the tactical level in Afghanistan and culminated as the Chief Information Officer for the 1st Special Forces Command Headquarters.
Dr. O’Connor is active in cyber security competitions, winning the National Defense University Cyber Competition, setting the high score for the SANS Netwars tournament, co-coaching two winning teams at the NSA’s Cyber Defense Competition, and leading the Red Team efforts for the Southeast Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.

Assistant Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, Florida International University, 2020
M.S., Cyber Engineering, Florida International University, 2016
B.S., Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University, 2013

Assistant Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Ph.D., Computer Science, Louisiana State University, 2022
M.S., Cyber Security, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, 2013
B.S., Information Technology, Calicut University, 2010

Dr. Sneha Sudhakaran, Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Florida Institute of Technology, received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Louisiana State University, LA. Dr. Sudhakaran has her research expertise in cyber forensics, focusing on mobile device forensics. As part of her PhD, she has developed Android mobile forensics tools like DroidScraper and AmpleDroid targeting forensic evidence recovery of Android application memory. She also has contributed towards research on Scada Forensics, Image Forensics with works published in reputed conferences.

Dr. Sudhakaran is the founder of the Women in Cyber Security (WiCyS) chapter at Florida Institute of Technology. She serves as a co-advisor of the FITSEC cybersecurity club. As an active member she contributes her research expertise to Women in Cyber Security Global, IEEE, American Association for Forensic Sciences, and ICCWS(International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security). She is also a reviewer in Elseivier, COSE journals, Digital Investigation and SIGCSE.  She serves as a conference committee member for  ICCWS, PAINE. She is an item writer for the Computer Hacking and Forensic Investigation course offered by Ec-Council. She serves as a Board of Studies member at Amrita University for curriculum development in Cyber Security. She received her Master’s in Cyber Security in 2013. She also worked as an Assistant Professor at MG University, Kerala, India. Her other research interests includes Memory Forensics, Application Security, Behavioral study impacting students planning to pursue degree in computer science topics, and Reverse Engineering.