Steven Ullman, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Information Systems and Cyber Security

Steven Ullman, Ph.D.

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Bio

Dr. Steven Ullman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security at the Alvarez College of Business. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona. During his Ph.D., Dr. Ullman was a research associate in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab at the Eller College of Management.

Dr. Ullman’s research focuses on developing AI-based methods for enhancing vulnerability detection, remediation, and management, particularly for open-source software and IT infrastructure. He has published his research in the Journal of Management Information Systems, AIS Transactions on Replication Research, ACM KDD AI4Cyber Workshop, and IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics conference. Dr. Ullman has presented his research through invited talks at the INFORMS Annual Meeting, the Open Data Science Conference (ODSC), and the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). His research has also been funded by multiple grants from the NSF's cybersecurity programs, including the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) and Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI) programs. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM, AIS, and INFORMS.

Research Interests

  • Cybersecurity analytics – vulnerability assessment and management, open-source software security, IT infrastructure security
  • Artificial Intelligence – deep learning, self-supervised learning, graph representation learning, language models
  • Computational design science

Degrees

  • Ph.D. University of Arizona
  • M.S. University of Arizona
  • M.B.A. Colorado State University-Pueblo
  • B.S. Colorado State University-Pueblo

Publications

  • “Enhancing Vulnerability Prioritization in Cloud Computing Using Multi-View Representation Learning,” with S. Samtani, H. Zhu, B. Lazarine, H. Chen, and J. F. Nunamaker, Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 708-743.
  • “Why Following Friends Can Hurt You: A Replication Study,” with B. Ampel, AIS Transactions on Replication Research (TRR), Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 1-16.
  • “Linking Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures to the MITRE ATT&CK Framework: A Self-Distillation Approach,” with B. Ampel, S. Samtani, and H. Chen, ACM KDD Workshop on AI-enabled Cybersecurity Analytics, pp. 1-4.
  • “VulnSSL: Identifying Relevant Vulnerability Remediation Strategies Using Self-Supervised Learning,” with H. Chen, International Conference on Secure Knowledge Management (SKM), pp. 1-10.
  • “Smart Vulnerability Assessment for Scientific Cyberinfrastructure: An Unsupervised Graph Embedding Approach,” with S. Samtani, H. Zhu, B. Lazarine, B. Ampel, M. Patton, and H. Chen, IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), pp. 1-6.