Mark Maloof's Bio

Bio

Currently, I am a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. I concluded my term as the the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) in July 2024. My research interests include machine learning, data mining, on-line learning algorithms, concept drift, and applications of machine learning and data mining to computer security. I led the effort that established Georgetown's first graduate programs in computer science and served as their first director. In 2004, I shared with Zico Kolter the award for the best application paper at KDD for our work on detecting malicious executables. In 2007, I shared with Greg Stephens and Kate Arndt a Program Innovation Award from the MITRE Corporation for our work on detecting insider threats. I have served as a consultant to industry, government, and nonprofit organizations.

After high school, I spent about seven years in Athens at the University of Georgia and managed to get a Bachelor's in Computer Science in 1989 and a Master's in Artificial Intelligence in 1992. My thesis dealt with incorporating temporal reasoning mechanisms into a production system, under the direction of Krys Kochut.

In the fall of 1992, I began a doctoral program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. After spending a year teaching undergraduate computer science courses, I began working in the Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory with Ryszard Michalski on a grant funded by the now defunct DARPA Image Understanding Program. This was a joint grant with the Computer Vision Lab at the University of Maryland, and we investigated how machine learning can be applied to problems in vision. In the fall of 1994, I had the opportunity to teach the AI class at Georgetown University, which was great fun. In the fall of 1996, I defended my dissertation, which dealt with learning static and changing concepts using partial instance memory.

After graduating, until the summer of 1998, I did post-doctoral work as a Research Scientist at the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise and as a Visiting Scholar in the Computational Learning Laboratory, Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. I worked with Pat Langley, Tom Binford, and Ram Nevatia on a project to use machine learning techniques to detect rooftops in aerial imagery using a data set provided by the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems at USC. This project was funded by the now defunct DARPA Image Understanding Program.

For fun, I play a little guitar and do a little sailing. I'm always in search of great sushi. Lately, the best has been at umi in San Francisco.