Honorable mention Gerrit van Dijk Award for Bram Cappers
TU/e Postdoc Bram Cappers receives honorable mention for best Data Science PhD thesis.
Every year the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW) and the Big Data Alliance (BDA) hand over three prestigious awards to support scientific research and application of Data science to real-world academic and industrial problems. The Gerrit van Dijk Award in this category is given to the best PhD thesis in the area of Data Science. This award went to Diederik Kingma for his exceptional contribution in the area of Deep learning. His research received over 25.000 citations in A+ conferences and journals. The prizes for best Data Science Startup and Data Science Institute were awarded to PacMed and Philips Research respectively.
JURY REPORT
"The Gerrit van Dijk Award is an important award: The field of Data Science is still young where exceptional research should be recognized. Data Science is difficult and knows many pitfalls: all steps should be taken carefully in order to process large amounts of data in a responsible way. In the thesis “Interactive Visualization of Event Logs for Cybersecurity” Bram Cappers has shown in a very creative and scientific integer way the importance of data visualization in this field. The core of the visualization problem is to determine when and which data should be presented and in what way. Interactive also means that new insights should be obtained fast. The thesis of Cappers is an impressive piece of work with a lot of impact. The jury is looking forward to the next developments of his technology in the startup AnalyzeData.“
Honorable mention for Bram Cappers
Because of the exceptionally high quality submission, the KHMW and BDA introduced an honorable mention for the work of Bram Cappers with the title “Interactive Visualization of Event Logs for Cybersecurity”. The PhD research of Cappers, former PhD candidate in the visualization group at TU/e and under supervision of prof. dr. ir. Jack van Wijk and prof. dr. Sandro Etalle, focused on the visualization and discovery of targeted computer virus attacks. In contrast to traditional viruses they are aimed at a single company and are designed to strike once. They often take months to prepare. To uncover suspicious activity in data traffic in time, Cappers developed new visualization software to discover patterns in network traffic by combining the intelligence of the human with the speed of automated data and process-mining techniques.
In one of his systems, called Eventpad, he visualizes system data flows into colorful block streams that easily reveals deviating and unexpected patterns. With the technology he discovered several forms of ransomware and telephone fraud in Voice Over IP traffic. Outside security, the technology also turnout to be useful for the detection chemical waste dumping in a nature preserve and the discovery of bottlenecks in cancer treatments.
START-UP AND PRIZES
With Eventpad, Cappers previously won the IEEE Visual Analytics Challenge in 2017, and won the 2018 ICT.OPEN Best Demo Award. He also presented his tool at Black Hat USA 2018, one of the world’s most prestigious international hacker conferences. Because of this success and the high level of interest from industry and academia, Cappers and colleague Josh Mengerink founded the start-up AnalyzeData to make the developed data analysis services available for industry.