Dr. Brian Ricks

Assistant Professor of Instruction

Degrees:

• Ph.D., Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas, August 2022
• M.S., Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas, May 2012
• B.S., Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas, May 2010

Research Interests:

• Computer network intrusion detection, specifically anomaly detection techniques that may be practical for real-world use.
• Large scale network data generation utilizing methodologies that promote realistic network traffic generation without client-side humans in the loop.
• Probabilistic graphical models, specifically their application to network intrusion detection and fault diagnostics.

Major Honors and Awards:

• Best Teaching Assistant Award, The University of Texas at Dallas, Spring 2020
• Best Paper Award, Lifting the Smokescreen: Detecting Underlying Anomalies During a DDoS Attack, ISI-18, November 2018
• Best Student Paper Award, Large-Scale Realistic Network Data Generation on a Budget, IRI-18, July 2018
• NASA Ames Honor Award, Student Category, October 2009
• Eagle Scout, Boy Scouts of America

Representative Publications:

• Brian Ricks, Patrick Tague, and Bhavani Thuraisingham, DDoS-as-a-Smokescreen: Leveraging Netflow Concurrency and Segmentation for Faster Detection, in IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications (TPS-ISA), December 2021
• Brian Ricks, Bhavani Thuraisingham, and Patrick Tague, Lifting the Smokescreen: Detecting Underlying Anomalies During a DDoS Attack, in IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), November 2018 [best paper]
• Brian Ricks, Patrick Tague, and Bhavani Thuraisingham, Large-Scale Realistic Network Data Generation on a Budget, in IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI), July 2018 [best student paper]
• Brian Ricks and Ole J. Mengshoel, Diagnosis for Uncertain, Dynamic and Hybrid Domains using Bayesian Networks and Arithmetic Circuits, International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (IJAR) 55.5, pp 1207 – 1234, 2014
• Brian Ricks, Craig Harrison, and Ole J. Mengshoel, Integrating Probabilistic Reasoning and Statistical Quality Control Techniques for Fault Diagnosis in Hybrid Domains, in Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society (PHM), September 2011