Michael Atighetchi (matighet@bbn.com)

Technical Skills
Java, C++, Ruby, Python, HTML, SQL, XML, OWL, SOAP, J2EE, CORBA, JCE, SSL, JESS

Education
M.S. Computer Science University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999
Member of international exchange program between Germany and the US
Thesis: Learning Quantitative Knowledge for Multi-Agent Coordination
M.S. Computer Science University of Stuttgart, Germany, 1999
B.A. Computer Science University of Stuttgart, Germany, 1996
Professional Positions
1999-present: BBN Technologies: Scientist in the Information and Knowledge Technology Business Unit
1998-1999, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Research Assistant, Advisor: Victor Lesser
1995-1999, InterCom Consulting, Network Consultant

 

Short Resume
Michael Atighetchi is a scientist at BBN's Information and Knowledge Technologies business unit. He has over 10 years of experience in distributed systems and middleware technologies, focusing on security and survivability of distributed systems. He was the PI of Cross Domain Service Discovery (XDDS) effort under AFRL’s Cross Domain Enterprise Solutions program and is technical lead on the Advanced Protected Services (APS) effort under AFRL’s Operational Information Management
thrust. Mr. Atighetchi has published over 35 technical papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and is an ACM member and senior member of the IEEE. Mr. Atighetchi holds a master's degree in computer science from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a master's degree in informatics from the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Project Activities
Michael Atighetchi has been technical lead or a major contributor on the following research and development projects:
·      2010-present: XDIME – Cross Domain Identity Management and Entitlement (AFRL)
Mr. Atighetchi is the Principal Investigator of this effort. The objective of this research is to design and prototype a set of services for providing identity management and access control across domains without violating existing data-sharing and domain specific security policies. The focus of this effort is on innovative research to make cross-domain sharing, mapping, and enforcing of identity and policy information safe, consistent, scalable, efficient, and amenable to certification and accreditation.
·      2009-present: LDADS for XSP– Lifecycle Management, Deconfliction, and Automatic Deployment Services for Cross Domain Security Policies (AFRL)
Mr. Atighetchi is the Principal Investigator of this effort. The goal of this effort is to provide an enterprise capability to dynamically and securely adapt CDS policies to changing operational risks and requirements.
·      2009-present: APS – Advanced Protected Services (AFRL)
As the technical lead for this effort, Mr. Atighetchi is creating architectures, designs, and mechanisms supporting survivability of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based distributed systems.
·      2008-2009: XDDS – Cross-Domain Service Discovery (AFRL)
As the PM and PI for this effort, Mr. Atighetchi is leading the development of a scalable architecture for cross-domain communication and specialized discovery protocols that are amenable to certification and accreditation.
·      2008-present: MOVIT – Mission-Oriented Virtually-aware Information archiTecture (ONR)
Mr. Atighetchi is the lead architect for the distributed publish-subscribe middleware used to disseminate and cache mission critical information between enterprise networks and forward deployed nodes.
·      2006-present: POIROT – Plan Order Induction from Reasoning about One Trial (DARPA Integrated Learning)
Mr. Atighetchi made key contributions to design and implementation of the core architecture that allows integration of diverse learning components via apache tomcat. Mr. Atighetchi also implemented ontological translations from a specialized learning task modeling language into lisp forms and sesame triples.
·      2008: ELSIF – Extensible, Layered Services for Information space Federation (AFRL)
Mr. Atighetchi designed and implemented advanced concepts for protecting mission critical information through federated security mechanisms that perform policy-based authentication and authorization.
·      2008: 100xJBI and Apollo survivability studies (AFRL)
Mr. Atighetchi was the PM and PI on these efforts and developed a flexible process for performing technology readiness level assessments on information management systems under stringent budget constraints.
·      2007-2008: CSISM – Cognitive Support for Intelligent Survivability Management (DARPA Self Regenerative Systems)
Mr. Atighetchi is the technical lead for designing and implementing a rule-based simulation environment that allows effective and accurate evaluation of the cognitive defense capabilities developed under this effort. He is also actively contributing to solve problems in the area of knowledge representation and encoding of effective and general defense logic.
·      2006- 2007: PhishBouncer – Behavioral Checks to prevent Phishing Attacks (DHS)
Mr. Atighetchi implemented an innovative web proxy for transparently proxying both HTTP and HTTPS. He also conceived and implemented numerous attribute checks for classifying suspicious requests.
·      2002 – 2005: DPASA – Designing Protection and Adaptation into a Survivable Architecture (DARPA Organically Assured and Survivable Information Systems Dem/Val)
Mr. Atighetchi designed major parts of the survivability architecture and implemented parts of it in a highly survivable JBI exemplar system. He also participated as an active red team member during a multi-week red team exercise to evaluate the effectiveness of the survivable JBI examplar.
·      2002: SAMS – Survivable Architecture for Monitoring Security (DARPA Organically Assured and Survivable Information Systems)
As the lead of this technology transition project, Mr. Atighetchi represented QuO at customer meetings and developed QuO code for an integrated technology demonstration. Mr. Atighetchi designed and implemented adaptive logic to redirect application traffic, and later refactored the code into a reusable QuO component for doing socket level adaptation.
·      1999-2002: APOD – Applications That Participate In Their Own Defense (DARPA Fault Tolerant Networking)
Mr. Atighetchi produced innovative designs and implementations of reusable network-based middleware defenses. He actively participated as a Blue Team member in the formal APOD Red Team experimentation process, and wrote significant parts of the APOD final project report.
·      2000-2002: ITUA – Intrusion Tolerance by Unpredictable Adaptation (DARPA Organically Assured and Survivable Information Systems)
Mr. Atighetchi is actively involved in the design and implementation of the ITUA architecture. He designed and implemented rapid reaction loops, worked on a technology demonstration for DarpaTech 2002, and participated in validation activities.
·      1999-2002: WSOA – Weapon Systems Open Architecture
As technical POC for this project, Mr. Atighetchi provides technical support and guidance to on-site developers. He developed a C++ version of the QuO-Kernel, implemented QuO contracts for adaptive management of CPU and network resources, and put together a testsuite for simulating the embedded WSOA environment.
·      1999-2002: QuO – Quality Object Middleware
Mr. Atighetchi is contributing to the ongoing process of improving the QuO middleware framework by maintaining the C++ QuO-Kernel and code generator. In addition, Mr. Atighetchi is also in charge of the open-source release process for QuO.


Professional Activities
·    Senior Member of the IEEE (2009)
·    Co-Chair of workshop on Biologically-Inspired and Cognitive Models for Mission Survivability (BioCoMS 2009) at IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA 2009)
·    Chair of workshop on Trustworthy Network Computing (TNC 2009) at IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA 2009)
·    Publicity co-chair for the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 9th International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2008)
·    Chair of workshop on Trustworthy Network Computing (TNC 2008) at IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA 2008)
·    Program Committee member for the 7th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA 2008)
·    Program Committee member for the 13th IEEE workshop on Dependable Parallel, Distributed and Network-Centric Systems (IEEE DPDNS 2008)
·    Reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2008)
·    Reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Computers (2008)
·    Reviewer for Elsevier Computer & Security (2008)
·    Chair of workshop on Trustworthy Network Computing (TNC 2007) at IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA 2007)
·    Program committee member for 12th IEEE workshop on Dependable Parallel, Distributed and Network-Centric Systems (IEEE DPDNS 2007)
·    Subject matter expert under the Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center's (IATAC) SME program (2007)

Publications

 

  1. Richard Schantz, Joseph Loyall, Michael Atighetchi, and Partha Pal. Packaging Quality of Service Control Behaviors for Reuse. ISORC 2002, The 5th IEEE International Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-time distributed Computing, April 29 - May 1, 2002, Washington, DC.
  2. Paul Rubel, Partha Pal, Michael Webber, Michael Atighetchi, and Chris Jones. Impediments to Building Survivable Systems: An Experience Report. IEEE ISW - 2001/2002 workshop.
  3. Partha Pal, Franklin Webber, Richard Schantz, Michael Atighetchi, and Joseph Loyall. Defense-Enabling Using Advanced Middleware - An Example. Proceedings Milcom 2001, October 28-31, 2001, Tysons Corner, Virginia.
  4. Joseph Loyall, Richard Schantz, Partha Pal, John Zinky , and Michael Atighetchi. Emerging Patterns in Adaptive, Distributed Real-Time, Embedded Middleware. OOPSLA 2001 Workshop - Towards Patterns and Pattern Languages for OO Distributed Real-time and Embedded Systems, October 14, 2001, Tampa Bay, Florida.
  5. M. Cukier, J. Lyons, P. Pandey, HV Ramasamy, William Sanders, Partha Pal, Franklin Webber, Richard Schantz, Joseph Loyall, Ronald Watro, Michael Atighetchi, and J. Gossett. Intrusion Tolerance Approaches in ITUA. Fast Abstract in Supplement of the 2001 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, July 1-4, 2001, Goeteborg, Sweden, pp. B-64 to B-65.
  6. Joseph Loyall, JM Gossett, Christopher Gill, Richard Schantz, John Zinky, Partha Pal, Richard Shapiro, Craig Rodrigues, Michael Atighetchi, and David Karr. Comparing and Contrasting Adaptive Middleware Support in Wide-Area and Embedded Distributed Object Applications. Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-21), April 16-19, 2001, Phoenix, Arizona.
  7. David Jensen, Michael Atighetchi, Regis Vincent, Victor Lesser. Learning Quantitative Knowledge for Multiagent Coordination. In the 16th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99), 24-31 August, Orlando, FL 1999.
  8. Victor Lesser, Michael Atighetchi, Brett Benyo, Bryan Horling, Anita Raja, Regis Vincent, Thomas Wagner, Ping Xuan, Shelley XQ. Zhang. A Multi-Agent System for Intelligent Environment Control. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Seattle, WA, USA 1999.