Charles Harry, associate research professor and senior research associate at CISSM, received a $115,000 grant from the Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII) for his work on a cloud-based web application that allows the public and private sector to model cyber risk in organizations or critical infrastructure.
The MII was created as a partnership between the State of Maryland and five Maryland academic research institutions to promote commercialization of research conducted in the partnership universities and leverage each institution’s strengths. The grant focuses on transitioning university research into technologies that can be more widely adopted.
Harry and his team received the grant based on the analytic framework developed at SPP, which won a UMD 2016 Invention of the Year Award and was leveraged by the UMD-incubated company, Decision Point Analytics, where Harry serves as CEO.
“Policy makers and business executives have identified strategic cyber risk as both a private problem as well as a public concern,” explains Harry. “The methodologies we have developed at the university can now be scaled across government and industry through this partnership with the state’s Maryland Innovation Initiative.”
The app, called “Tapestry”, is currently in development. The grant will be used to further its development and enable its deployment with some beta partners.The School’s contributions to the development of Tapestry furthers the Cyber Policy Initiative’s goals to transform original research into scalable solutions to solve a public problem.
“By creating a private-public partnership we are able to leverage cutting edge theoretical research with innovative technology to untangle the complex fabric of strategic risk stemming from cyber attack,” Harry says.
