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William is a Research Scientist within the Center of Excellence at EMC Ireland. He carries out research (directed by Donagh Buckley the CTO & director of EMC Research Europe) on infrastructure and systems security configuration management. Within EMC, William forms part of an EU wide multidisciplinary and multi-partner research team collaborating on the EU FP7 SPECS Cloud security project.

In addtion at EMC, William has a strong research focus towards the 3rd Platorm with a particular emphasis on Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC).

On a professional capacity, William servers as a Committee Member of the Cloud Security Alliance SLA Working Group. He also serves as a Program Committee Member for IFIP SEC, AIMSA, SECRYPT, SETOP and CRiSIS. He has also served as a Publications Chair for SETOP and CRiSIS. William acts as a reviewer for a number of computer security journals and conferences.

In the past, William was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University College Cork and was a member of the Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C). He carried out research (directed by Dr. Simon Foley) on network security configuration, threat management and cyber-physical security. 

William holds a Ph.D. in Computer Security from University College Cork. He also holds the following degrees M.Sc. (research) and B.Sc. (honours) both from N.U.I. Maynooth. He previously held research posts at Waterford Institute of Technology's TSSG and at Ericsson Applied Research Laboratories, Ireland.

Research Interests (include)

The 3rd Platform:

- Automated Security Configuration Management of Software Defined Data Centers.

Cloud Security & NgDC:

- Automated SLA negotiation.

- Automated SLA Monitoring.

- Automated SLA Enforcement.

Autonomic Network Security Configuration Management:

- Firewall Synthesis & Analysis.

- SAN Switch Synthesis & Analysis.

- Smartphone Security.

Threat & Vulnerability Management:

- (Decentralised) Semantic Threat Graphs.

Compliance-Driven Security Configuration:

- Best Practice Standards.

            - For example, NIST SP 800 series, NIST SCAP and RFC's.

Cyber-Physical Security:

- Anomaly Analysis.

Ontology Engineering:

- Applying Semantic Modelling and Reasoning Techniques to the Security Domain.

           - For example, firewall, XMPP, SAN switch, threat modelling and SCAP domains.