Office: Department of Computer Science, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Code CS/Rp, 1411 Cunningham Road, Monterey CA 93943. Phone: (831) 656-2462. Fax: (831) 656-2814. Email: ncrowe at nps dot edu.
History: Ph.D. in Computer Science, Stanford University, 1983; S.M. and E. E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978; S.B. in Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1975. Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1983; tenured in 1989; promoted to full professor in 2000.
Prof. Rowe was rated in the top 2% of computer scientists in a 2022 survey based on career publications and citations: HREF=https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/6)>https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/6)>.
Interests: A broad range of topics in applied artificial intelligence. His main research interests are in data mining, digital forensics, modeling of deception, and cyberwarfare. He has also worked on text processing, computational geometry, and intelligent tutoring systems.
Current chair of the Artificial Intelligence Track of the Computer Science Department.
Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Track specialization course requirements
Information about the certificate program: Artificial Intelligence for Military Use
Information about the Master of Applied Computing degree obtained by taking three certificate programs
Current chair of the Ph.D. Program Committee of the Computer Science Department. Our student handbook is:
Handbook of the Computer Science Ph.D. program
Course materials (including downloads) for Prof. Rowe's courses
Syllabus for CS4677, Computer Forensics
Syllabus for CS3331, Basics of Applied Artificial Intelligence
Syllabus for CS4333, Current Directions in Artificial Intelligence
Syllabus for CS4315, Introduction to Machine Learning and Data Mining (distance learning only)
If you have questions about official Academic Council policy on degrees, courses, and grades, follow the link below to the official School policy handbook.
Academic Council Policy Manual
Affiliated with the Modeling, Virtual Environments, and
Simulation (MOVES) curriculum and the Cyber Academic Group.
MOVES Institute information
The NPS Computer Science home page is:
NPS Computer Science Department home page
Prof. Rowe's recommended thesis outline and guidelines
Prototype Python program for finding unnecessary wording in text and HTML Web files, useful for student theses
Flyer for Rowe and Rrushi, Introduction to Cyberdeception
Curriculum vitae for Prof. Rowe
Brief on AI in CS at NPS
Forensics programs and data
About information security:
Paper evaluating the SoarTech deception planner
Paper on detecting malicious activity with the RDP (remote desktop) protocol
Paper evaluating the Thug client honeypot tool
Paper generating new attack variants against industrial control systems
Paper on hardening honeypots
Paper on vulnerability disclosure and patching trends
Introduction to special issue on situation awareness for cybersecurity
Paper on testing of industrial-control-system honeypots in the cloud with T-Pot
Paper on testing of industrial-control-system honeypots in the cloud
Paper on detection of distributed malware
Paper on testing of industrial-control-system honeypots
Book chapter on privacy issues in digital forensics
Book chapter on honeypot deception
Paper on distinguishing user roles in network flow data
Paper on honeypots for spies
Paper on finding associations between secondary-storage images
Paper on finding and rating forensic usefulness of personal names on drives
Paper comparing Macintosh main-memory forensic tools
Paper on building networks from email addresses found on drives
Later and better paper about automatically identifying forensically uninteresting files on drives
Paper finding contextual clues to malware on drives
Paper on improving honeypots with deception
Paper on intrusion detection for industrial control systems
Paper analyzing files left on a mobile phone after a factory reset
Paper comparing methods of predicting intrusion alerts
Early paper on automatically identifying forensically uninteresting files on drives
Paper on natural-language translation of file paths
Paper on testing the NSRL hash sets for known files
Paper on detecting suspicious behavior with drive metadata forensics
Paper comparing the Suricata and Snort intrusion-detection systems
Paper on detecting anomalous and suspicious file and directory information
Paper on forensics of disk directory time information
Paper on automatic flow analysis of security information on the Web
Paper comparing methods of spam and phishing detection
Paper on retrieving security statistics automatically from the Web
Short paper on evaluation of intrusion-prevention systems
Short paper on automatically building a vulnerability database
Short paper on modeling of social engineering
Second (and better) paper on detecting fake computer file systems
Paper on detecting fake computer file systems
Paper on using decoys for intrusion defense
Paper on distributed intrusion detection using alert levels
Paper on design of distributed intrusion detection
Paper on the computer-system intrusion-detection simulator and tutor
Paper on preventing cheating in distance learning
Paper on inference-security analysis using resolution theorem proving
Paper on Diophantine compromise of a statistical database
Dennis Ingram M.S. thesis on distributed intrusion detection
Steven Kremer M.S. thesis evaluating Windows NT intrusion detection in light of Navy IT-21 policy
Don Julian M.S. thesis about deceptive strategies for Web browsers under attack
Valter Monteiro M.S. thesis about using open-source intrusion detection software for deceptive tactics
Keith Labbe M.S. thesis about testing intrusion prevention systems
Lena Laribee M.S. thesis about social engineering
Dave Barnes M.S. thesis about phishing
Eugene Albin M.S. thesis comparing Snort and Suricata intrusion-detection products
Riqui Schwamm M.S. thesis on effects of factory resets on mobile devices
Nick Carr M.S. thesis on cybersecurity of industrial control systems
David Smith M.S. thesis on cybersecurity of point-of-sale terminals
Ahmen Yahyaoui thesis on two deception tools for honeypots
Jason Shaver M.S. thesis about analyzing the Windows 10 registry
Jeff Macy M.S. thesis about geolocating Web server cyberattacks
Sean McKenna M.S. thesis about honeypots for malicious Web robots
Casandra Martin M.S. thesis about imaging mobile phones
Boulat Chainourov M.S. thesis about processing of large amounts of forensic data
Ryan McCaughey M.S. thesis about testing an SSH honeypot tool
Raymond Goldberg thesis about testing automated assessment of forensic value of pictures
Jennifer Johnson M.S. thesis about taking 512-byte hashes of entire disk drives
Jeff Dean Ph.D. dissertation about detecting suspicious activity from network-flow data alone
Dahae Hyun M.S. thesis on an industrial-control system honeypot
Wai Chong and Roger Koh M.S. thesis on honeypot-deception experiments
Blake Henderson M.S. thesis on honeypots for spies
Marian Kendrick and Zaky Rucker M.S. thesis on honeypots for industrial control systems
Bruce Allen M.S. thesis on visualization of software versions
George Harter M.S. thesis on partitioned malware
Jeff Dougherty M.S. thesis on implementing honeypots for cyber-physical systems
Drew and Heinen thesis on testing a game-theory product for planning cyberdeceptions on local-area networks
About cyberwarfare:
Survey of ethics issues with choice of algorithm for artificial intelligence
Project report on evolutionary algorithms for anticipating technological surprise
Paper on cyberdeterrence
Paper on a taxonomy of norms for cyberwarfare
Paper on persistent cyberweapons
Paper on stream processing for deception
Paper on civilian collateral damage in cyberwarfare (improved version of following talk)
Talk at University of Oxford on civilian collateral damage in cyberwarfare
Paper on addressing North Korean cyberattacks
Paper on strategic cyber coercion
Paper on the challenges of attributing cyberattacks in cyberwarfare
Paper on what distinguishes cyberwar ethics from warfare ethics in general
Paper on cyber perfidy
Paper on real-time experiments with deception on cyberattackers
Introductory article on the ethics of cyberwarfare
Similar article to preceding
Improved paper on the technology for cyberarms agreements
Paper on the technology for cyberarms agreements
Paper on reversible cyberattacks
Paper on the ethics of cyberweapons
Paper on the possibility of war crimes in cyberspace
2nd paper on experiments with a deceptive honeypot
Paper on deception and information theory
Paper on automated negative persuasion using deception
Paper on simple experiments with deception on a honeypot
Paper on decision-theoretic analysis of cyberdeception
Paper on fake honeypots as a defensive tactic
Original conference paper version of preceding
Paper on finding logically consistent deceptions for cyberspace
Second (and better) paper on using generic excuses for deceptive software
Paper on using generic excuses for deceptive software
Paper on automated planning for deceptive software
Paper giving a taxonomy of deception in cyberspace
Paper on analogies for information systems of military deception
Paper on experiments with a deceptive Web portal
2002 Short overview paper on the software decoy project
2002 Paper surveying our software decoy project
Greg Tan M.S. thesis surveying cyberterrorism
Binh Duong M.S. thesis about setting up honeypots
Harry Lim M.S. thesis about deceptive honeypots
James Goh M.S. thesis about deceptive honeypots
Erwin Frederick M.S. thesis about deceptive honeypots
Daniel Flemming M.S. thesis about cyber coercion (excerpted)
Maribel Cisneros M.S. thesis about cyber post-conflict requirements
Clinton Woods M.S. thesis about implementing cyber coercion
Ji Min Park M.S. thesis about North Korean cyberattacks
Carissa Hall M.S. thesis about perishability of cyberweapons
Elizabeth Wanic M.S. thesis about cyberdeterrence
Kory Krebs MBA project about adoption of artificial intelligence for procurement
About sensor networks:
Report on classifying AUV signals
Paper on finding anomalous aircraft from their tracks
Paper on finding correlations between ships from their tracks
Paper on improving localization by sensors assuming consistency
Paper on detecting suspicious motion using an Android phone as a sensor
Paper on detecting suspicious motion in public areas using nonimaging sensors
Paper on energy-efficient use of cable sensors
Paper on minimizing transmission power with cable sensors
Paper on detecting suspicious motion in video sequences of public areas
Paper on visualizing Marine training performance using sensor networks
Paper on finding IED emplacement behavior with sensor networks
Paper on using smartphones as sentry sensors on Marine deployments
Paper on localization of targets with nonimaging sensor networks
Paper on deployment of fiber-optic cables as seismic sensors
Paper on use of smart phones as seismic sensors
Paper on detecting suspicious behavior with nonimaging sensors
Second paper on automated performance assessment of Marines in urban training
Paper on automated performance assessment of Marines in urban training from images
Paper on the problems of using sensor networks for detecting emplacement of improvised explosive devices
Paper on detecting suspicious and coordinated behavior in a sensor field
Paper on detecting magnetic and infrared activity in a sensor field
Paper on detecting suspicious behavior with image processing
Paper on recognizing suspicious movement behavior (2)
Paper on recognizing suspicous movement behavior (1)
Ken Macklin M.S. thesis examining reconfigurable software for signal processing
Andrew Sollish M.S. thesis on mining co-ocurrences of vessels
About modeling and simulation:
Overview of algorithms for artificial intelligence
Paper on case-based reasoning for summarizing results of simulation runs
Paper analyzing pilot performance in aircraft-carrier landings
Paper on three approaches to simulating naval air defense
Paper on simulation of battlefield sensor networks
Paper on simulation of naval air defense teams
Paper on study of firefighting team efficiency using simulation
Paper on automatic analysis of counterplanning
Patricio Salgado M.S. thesis modeling naval ship replenishment
Sylvio Andrade M.S. thesis modeling Navy firefighting with a multiagent simulation
Arthur Aragon M.S. thesis on modeling urban combat for a tutor
Ahmet Guven M.S. thesis on improving a Prolog program to find conflicts in policy for networks
Sharif Calfee M.S. thesis on modeling an air-defense command center on a ship (George Phillips Award winner)
Sean Hynes M.S. thesis on best sensor deployment for battlefield settings (Grace Hopper award winner)
Baris Ozkan M.S. thesis on modeling naval air defense using conceptual blending (Grace Hopper Award winner)
About data mining and information retrieval:
Executive summary of NRP 23-N227-C
Journal paper from collaboration with industry on predicting performance of naval aviators from training scores
Summary paper on NPS work predicting performance of naval aviators from training scores
More about the MARIE project on data mining of captioned multimedia
Paper on mining of intelligence information
2005 book chapter, surveying caption extraction on the Web
Paper assessing the importance of context in finding Web captions
1999 overview paper on MARIE
Paper on MARIE-4 at its World Wide Web image-caption extraction
Short paper on the extension of the previous to audio and video
Short paper on automatically finding advertisements on Web pages
Paper on automatically finding and labeling the subject on a captioned imageIn PDF format
Paper on MARIE-3's World Wide Web caption extraction
Earlier overview paper on MARIE
Paper on image-region classification of MARIE
Paper on natural-language processing of MARIE-2
Paper by Eugene Guglielmo on natural-language processing of MARIE-1
Earlier paper on natural-language processing of MARIE
Paper on MARIE software handling abbreviations and misspellings
1997 paper on finding captions for Web images
1998 paper on mapping between image regions and caption concepts
Paper on reference resolution in image captions
Paper on use of caption understanding for decision support in command-and-control
1995 paper on processing challenges in MARIE
Paper on optimization of information filtering in MARIE
Paper on load balancing in parallel implementations of MARIEIn PDF format
Paper on inferring degrees of item interest from database queries
Paper on parsing of query sequences to a database
Mike Niedert M.S. thesis on automatic scheduling algorithms for heterogeneous networks
Scott Hall M.S. thesis on automatically classifying email from textual clues
Peter Wu M.S. thesis on methodology for building Internet portals
Seksit Siripala M.S. thesis on open-source Web site design
Ann Lee and Ed Powers M.S. thesis on ontology-based assistance to Web searches
Fred Krenson M.S. thesis on automatically mining reports of arms sales
S. C. Kang M.S. thesis on optimal planning of vehicle resources (Grace Hopper Award Winner)
Jerry Peacock M.S. thesis on refresh rates of Marine information technology hardware
Anthony Ambriz M.S. thesis on building a database for Marine training records
Jim Zhou M.S. thesis on distributed processing of aircraft data
Andrew Nelson M.S. thesis on automatically summarizing Marine peer evalautions
About image processing:
2000 paper on inferring changes to linear features in aerial photographs
Paper on automatically classifying ship types from infrared images
1999 Paper on system design for updating terrain databases from aerial photos
Paper on intelligent customized terrain databases
Luiz Cardoso M.S. thesis on finding buildings automatically in aerial photographs
Jessica Herman M.S. thesis on identifying ships from infrared side views (Grace Hopper Award winner)
Jorge Alves M.S. thesis on automatically classifying ship types from infrared images
Victor Ross M.S. thesis on software support for meteorological dispersion models
Vassilios Papaliakos M.S. thesis on automatic content repurposing of electrical diagrams for small devices
Michael Rost M.S. thesis about an agent-based system for providing tactical meteorological information
About intelligent tutoring systems:
Overview paper on the enhancement of Marine training performance using sensor networks
Paper on visualizing Marine training performance using sensor networks
Paper on automated performance assessment of Marines in urban training
Paper on the ship navigation tutor
Overview paper on METUTOR
Paper on the intrusion-detection tutor
Manual for METUTOR, tools for building procedural-skills tutors
Paper on the A* search tutoring shell
Paper on the logic semantics tutor
Paper on inductive common-ground tutoring and the grammar tutor
Johnathan Mooring thesis about automatically generating training review quizzes
About software engineering:
Paper on model-based ultra-high frequency hardware/software design
2001 paper on natural-language processing for a policy workbench
Paper on a case study of requirements reuse helped by automated requirements matching
Paper on software for fault-tolerant satellites
Eric Stierna M.S. thesis on software requirements reuse helped by automated requirements matching
Matt Lisowski M.S. thesis on software design for a FLIR infrared image-video ship-identification system
Vanessa Ong M.S. thesis on steps toward a natural-language front end to a policy workbench
Yilmaz Degirmenci M.S. thesis on an algorithm for text-based reasoning by analogy
John Custy M.S. thesis on natural-language input issues for a policy workbench
Brenda Powers M.S. thesis on evaluating collaborative software
Daniel Chang Ph.D. dissertation on software/firmware/hardware codesign
About path planning:
Paper about simulated annnealing for finding optimal paths on weighted regions
Paper about finding emergency routes on ships
Paper about optimal path maps on weighted regions
Paper #3 (the best) on anisotropic path planning
Paper #2 on anisotropic path planning, on cones
Paper #1 on anisotropic path planning, on polyhedra
Paper about path planning on weighted regions
Paper about path planning with roads, rivers, and rocks
Paper on the three-dimensional weighted-region problem
Earlier paper about optimal path maps on weighted regions
Paper about optimal-plan maps
About statistical analysis methods:
Paper on management of regression models
Paper on antisampling, statistics derived from others
Paper on bounds on set intersection sizes
Paper on bounds on statistics of nonlinearily-transformed data
Paper on inheritance of statistical properties
Miscellaneous research papers:
Paper on analyzing underwater sounds via shape correlations between hydrophones
Paper on grammar as a programming language
John Mades M.S. thesis surveying quantum computers
Survey articles:
Short survey of cyberdeception
Survey of algorithms for artificial intelligence
Survey of the ethics of deception in cyberspace
Survey on deception in cyber-attacks
Survey on deception in defense from cyber-attacks
Survey on the ethics of cyber-attacks
Survey on cyber-attacks on digital government
Survey on content management systems
Survey on trust in digital government
Survey on use of multimedia in digital government
Survey on deception in electronic goods and services
Survey on deception methods in virtual communities
Survey on the ethics of deception in virtual communities
Survey on detection and response to deception in virtual communities
Survey on emanations security
Survey on exploiting captions for multimedia
Survey on content repurposing for small handheld devices
Survey on digital libraries
Survey on multimedia systems
Survey on image processing
Text of Neil C. Rowe, Artificial Intelligence through Prolog, Prentice-Hall, 1988
Pedagogical papers (mostly for high-school students):
Paper on the importance of naming in programming
Paper relating turtle geometry and analytic geometry
Paper on a way to teach trigonometry through 3D graphics
Paper on more neat geometrical designs using turtle geometry
Paper on neat things to do with property lists
Paper on melody transformations
1. Artificial intelligence
- Automatically create summaries of fitness reports using natural-language processing
- Military-operations planning using artificial intelligence (currently studying missile strikes at sea)
- Invent and rate technological surprises with an evolutionary algorithm
- Test methods to thwart adversary attempts to subvert machine learning
- Look for trends in Navy-aviator training
- Develop AI-based tutors for important training skills
2. Information security
- Do machine learning of cyberattacks using honeypots in the cloud (currently using industrial-control honeypots)
- Compare versions of executables automatically, try to characterize changes that occur in different versions (and also recognize malware)
- Evaluate security of ship networks
- Evaluate security problems of autonomous vehicles
3. Cyberdeception
- Build and test specialized honeypots that deceive cyberattackers
- Test commercial cyberdeception products
- Mine data from the Dark Web
- Analyze influence operations on the Internet
4. Cyberwarfare strategy and tactics
- Improve attribution of cyber operations to countries and organizations
- Scheduling one-time use of cyberweapons
- Improving cyberweapon reliability
- Building reversible cyberweapons
- Methods for addressing insider threats
List of suggested thesis and dissertation topics
Presentation giving illustrations of suggested thesis and dissertation topics
Go to NPS Computer Science Department home page
Material contained herein is made available for the purpose of peer review and discusssion and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.