Coles research symposium on Homeland Security

I recently attended the Coles Research Symposium on Homeland Security hosted by the Kennesaw State University Coles College of Business. The symposium was organized by Prof. Jomon Paul, and he made sure all attendees felt welcome. I gave a keynote talk entitled “New frontiers in homeland security: advances and opportunities.”

The symposium was focused and interdisciplinary, with a single track of engaging speakers. who discussed advances in homeland security research. The talks spanned economics, optimal control, operations research, behavioral economics, public policy and information systems. I hadn’t attended a small, interdisciplinary conference like this in years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I had sorely missed the opportunity to network and grow as a researcher at symposiums such as this. As a result, the symposium was more intellectually stimulating than usual. I was able to meet everyone at the conference and had research conversations with the other speakers and attendees during meals and breaks. We came from different quantitative disciplines, and our different assumptions and perspectives were complementary. The conversations energized me and caused me to think more deeply about important homeland security problems to address. I left the conference excited about my future research endeavors and starting new projects.

Papers I highlighted in my talk:

1. Albert, L.A., Nikolaev, A., and Jacobson, S.H. 2022. Homeland Security Research Opportunities. To appear in IISE Transactions. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24725854.2022.2045392.
2. Enayaty-Ahangar, F., Albert, L.A., DuBois, E. 2021. A survey of optimization models and methods for cyberinfrastructure security. IISE Transactions 53(2), 182 – 198. https://doi.org/10.1080/24725854.2020.1781306
3. Albert, L.A., Nikolaev, A., Lee, A.J., Fletcher, K., and Jacobson, S.H., 2021. A Review of Risk-Based Security and Its Impact on TSA PreCheck, IISE Transactions 53(6), 657 – 670. https://doi.org/10.1080/24725854.2020.1825881