Education

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013
           Dissertation: "On the Robustness of Network Infrastructures to Disasters and Physical Attacks."

M.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007
           Dissertation: “Efficiency Loss in a Class of Two-Sided Market Mechanisms.”

B.S., Electrical Engineering, Highest Honors, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2013

Biography

Sebastian Neumayer is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at UAA. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. His thesis dealt with the survivability of network infrastructures after disasters and physical attacks. He also spent five years working at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division, where he focused on developing security metrics that accurately estimate risk for prevalent network threats. Along with his teaching responsibilities, Dr.Neumayer is continuing his research on the reliability of networks during both physical and cyber attacks.  He is also interested in all things Bitcoin/cryptocurrency, and even has a project to augment jewelry with Bitcoin and other digital assets. He welcomes anyone to reach out to him regarding digital currencies. 

Teaching Responsibilities

 Introduction To C Programming For Engineers (CSE A205)

Research Interests

Motivated by the effects of attacks and natural disasters on fiber infrastructures, Professor Neumayer is interested in the survivability of networks to geographically-correlated failures. His research has resulted in algorithms to identify the most vulnerable parts of real-world networks to large-scale disasters, and design mechanisms to make networks robust to such failures.

Given the proliferation of recent high-profile cyber attacks, he has developed an interest in creating network security metrics that can accurately estimate risk from an attacker which can pivot through a network. Specifically, he has considered an attacker that gains a foothold on a network enclave and pivots to vulnerable devices with the goal of compromising as many devices as possible. The goal of this research is to design topologies as well as patching/re-imaging policies which mitigate this type of cyber threat.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are gaining popularity, but basic research regarding mining incentives and security metrics is still nascent. In this area, Professor Neumayer is interested in the security properties of Bitcoin transaction acceptance policies that do not wait for a fixed number of confirmations. He is also interested in analyzing mining under dynamic incentives, such as when the block rewards are primarily composed of transaction fees.

Publications

Neumayer, S. and E. Modiano. 2016. “Network Reliability Under Geographically Correlated Line and Disk Failure Models.” Computer Networks 94 (January): 14-28.

Neumayer, S., A. Efrat, and E. Modiano. 2015. “Geographic Max-flow and Min-cut Under a Circular Disk Failure Model.” Computer Networks 77 (February):117-127.

Neumayer, S., G. Zussman, R. Cohen, and E. Modiano. 2011. “Assessing the Vulnerability of the Fiber Infrastructure to Disasters.” IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking 19 (December), No. 6: 1610-1623.

Exhibitions

C. Sahin, J. Pena, J. Riordan, S. Neumayer, and W. Streilein. “Capturing the Security Effects of Network Segmentation via a Continuous-time Markov Chain Model.” Proc. ANSS'17, Apr. 2017.

S. Neumayer and E. Modiano. “Assessing the Effect of Geographically Correlated Failures on Interconnected Power-Communication Networks.” Proc. IEEE SMARTGRIDCOMM'13, Oct. 2013.

S. Neumayer, A. Efrat, and E. Modiano. “Geographic Max-Flow and Min-cut Under a Circular Disk Failure Model.” Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'12, Mar. 2012.

S. Neumayer and E. Modiano. “Network Reliability Under Random Circular Cuts,” to appear in Proc. IEEE GLOBECOM'11, Dec. 2011.

S. Neumayer and E. Modiano. “Network Reliability with Geographically Correlated Failures.” Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'10, Mar. 2010.

S. Neumayer, G. Zussman, R. Cohen, and E. Modiano. “Assessing the Vulnerability of the Fiber Infrastructure to Disasters.” Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'09, Apr. 2009.

S. Neumayer, G. Zussman, R. Cohen, and E. Modiano. “Assessing the Impact of Geographically Correlated Network Failures.” Proc. IEEE MILCOM'08, Nov. 2008.

Career History/Work Experience

University of Alaska Anchorage, Computer Science and Engineering Department – Assistant Professor, 2017 to present

MIT Lincoln Laboratory – Cyber Analytics and Decision Systems Group – Technical Staff, 2012-2017