I am currently working as an applied machine learning scientist, leading ML research for a market-leading anti-bot solutions provider. I mentor researchers, lead initiatives, shape the roadmap, and conduct high-impact research on abuse, fraud, and bot mitigation products. I work closely with engineering and ML engineering as well as product.

Previously, I co-founded APTA Technologies, a TU Delft spin-off company offering services and solutions for analyzing sequential, computer-generated data. Over the years, I acted as principal IC, EM, PM, and CEO, leading teams building greenfield projects both for enterprise and SME clients, leading fundrasing efforts, and market validation. APTA Technologies focused on generating insights from software logs for various applications in the DevSecOps space, in particular incident response for endpoints. Working with managed sercurity service providers, we reduced incident response time by up to 30%.

Until Spring 2021, I was also a PostDoc researcher in the Cyber Security Group at the Intelligent Systems Department at the TU Delft. I worked on machine learning methods for cyber data application, in particular but not limited to reverse engineering software from log/trace data.

I am interested in machine learning and its applications, in particular in protocol and program inference, and program analysis. More specifically, and I want to learn a model that converts a sequence of observations (or inputs) into a sequence of responses (or outputs). The goal is to obtain a that model is not just a magic black box, but is a description of an operational or computational process. This models explains the behavior of the system generating the data, i.e. how to convert the input to the output.

Before that, I worked as a research scientist on an industrial project in Luxembourg. I used techniques for learning representations of discrete, structured, or sequential data in unsupervised settings. The field of application focused on financial transactions for KYC/AML, fraud analysis, authentication data for computer systems, and telecommincation log data.

I always enjoyed supervising bachelor, master and PhD students in academia, as well as interns my start-up. I’m currently taking on mentees on Mentorcruise:

Recent Activities

Together with a team of colleages from TU Delft, we won the KDD Adversarial Machine Learning Workshop’s Robust Learning challenge both on the attack and defend tracks. Details of the results are available online.

Further Information

Short Bio

Before coming to Delft, I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, which is part of the University of Luxembourg. I spent my time in the Service and Data Management (SEDAN) group headed by Radu State.

Way before starting my Ph.D. I worked on problems in the theory of concurrent systems at TU Berlin, mapping process calculi into category theory construction. I graduated from FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg with a diploma in computer science.

About my Work

During my Ph.D. in Luxembourg, I focused on learning models that at their core have a finite state space: (probabilistic) finite state machines, deterministic transducers like Mealy machines, and ad-hoc defined variants of finite models. Despite their limited expressive power (compared to Turing complete universal computation models), there are many useful applications of these models in computer sciences. Together with Nino Pellegrino and Qin Lin at TU Delft, we looked at network traffic and summary statistics to build models that profile and fingerprint hosts on networks. I also built on Sicco Verwer’s DFASAT tool to build flexfringe, a tool to define heuristics to learn a wide range of automaton models using a red-blue type of state-merging algorithm.

Publications

Recent publications: See my ORCID or Google Scholar.

Besides academic work and publications, I am also trying to blog over at automatonlearning.net and my personal blot, cinrizasti.

Talks

This list is no longer updated. (2019) Generative Neural Models for discrete and tabular data at the Cyber Security seminar at TU Delft

About my Background

After passing the undergrad portion of my computer science diploma degree at the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg In Germany, I concentrated on mathematical methods and theoretic foundations in computer sciences, taking classes on numerics of partial differential equations, functional analysis, simulation on high performance systems as well as algebra, information and quantum information theory, logic, complexity theory, and cryptography.

Towards the end of my program, I moved to Berlin and joined Uwe Nestmann’s group on models and theory of distributed systems as a student researcher. Both my undergrad and graduate (“Studienarbeit” and “Diplomarbeit”) theses were written during my time in Berlin, where I worked on a project investigating the expressive power of distributed modeling languages, in particular variants of Petri nets, CCS, pi calculi, and the join calculus. In my theses, I looked at reactive systems and contextual transition systems of Robin Milner’s bigraphs. I encoded some calculi into bigraphs in such that the encoding respects not only bisimulations but accounts for also step-readiness semantics.

Interests

I enjoy a solid balance between working in the abstract, i.e. using formal systems and investigating their potential and limits, and having impactful, hands-on results in the real world. Answering questions about the expressive power and capability to predict or explain the world fascinates me as much as having a practical way to exploit the answers to these questions.

The draw of the abstract and mathematical, for me personally, lies in the flexibility of their applications, which range from the social sciences to engineering, from bio-informatics to cognitive science, from physics to finance. My curiosity and passion for applying mathematics in a transdisciplinary way have led me to pursue psychology, linguistics, and politics.

In my free time, I enjoy learning new languages (currently, French and Dutch, you can check out my profile on Duolingo), reading (especially science fiction, thrillers and fantasy novels), and athletics (I particularly enjoy skiing whenever I have the chance).

You can also find me on Mastodon.