Abel Sanchez

Dr. Sanchez holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the Executive Director of MIT's Geospatial Data Center (GDC). His areas of specialty include the Internet of Things (IOT), Big Data, Cybersecurity, and Digital Innovation. He teaches graduate courses in Data Science, Cybersecurity, and Innovation. For the past eight years his research has focused on architecting large-scale computation.

In IOT, Dr. Sanchez led the global network architecture for the Internet of Things at MIT. The design addresses large-scale computation. Compared to the largest numbers in the world, 2 billion computers, 7 billion phones, and 7 billion people, IOT is orders of magnitude bigger. In similar work, Dr. Sanchez directed simulation of the U.S. critical infrastructure with the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC).

In data science, early work included supply chain information engineering, analytics, simulation, and visualization with Wal-Mart, Kraft, and SAP. Dr. Sanchez extended his work to global anti-counterfeiting efforts with Johnson & Johnson, SAP, and Altria. Helping Altria scale track-and-trace using the Electronic Product Code Information Services standard from RFID. The work produced a global infrastructure used by industry and government to this day.

In enterprise computing, Dr. Sanchez led the design of a global data infrastructure simulator, modeling follow-the-sun engineering, to evaluate the impact of competing architectures on the performance, availability and reliability of the system for Ford Motor Company. The simulator modeled user actions, applications, background processes, network load, servers, storage, and global data centers. The work identified data center reductions opportunities estimated at a billion dollars in savings.

In cyber security, Dr. Sanchez directed impact analysis of large-scale cyber attacks designing Cyber Ranges for the Department of Defense (DOD). Conducting repeatable experiments in impact analysis and the ability to model the cyber environment in a highly portable fashion. Looking at the insider threat Dr. Sanchez led the DOD security study on Enterprise Resource Planning systems across the United States Armed Forces.

In password security, Dr. Sanchez led the design of a password firewall (negative authentication) for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency. The Negative Filtering or Negative Authentication (NA) approach utilizes a form of complement profiles which resembles the censoring and maturation process of T- cells in the immune system.

In machine learning, addressing financial fraud, Dr. Sanchez designed a situational awareness framework that exploits different perspectives of the same financial data and assigns risk scores to entities (e.g. payment documents) to improve false positive ratios and assist the identification of fraudulent activity in huge and unlabeled financial data in collaboration with Accenture.

In physical security, Dr. Sanchez is developing algorithms to assess risk in the integration of information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT).

Dr. Sanchez is the founder and Chief Software Architect of the Open Source RFID platform project. Dr. Sanchez' software systems are used by Samsung, NEC, NTT, Hitachi, Motorola, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft. Other software initiatives are in use by Sandia National Laboratories, MIT, and by several organizations in East Asia and Europe.

Dr. Sanchez advises companies in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Asia.