Bio

Dr. Polar Humenn is a computer scientist, an academic, a business owner, and an entrepreneur. Devoting his professional life to the pursuit of computer science, he has found himself involved with many endeavors concerning operating systems, graphic user interfaces, networks, wireless networks, and distributed system security -- all with an emphasis on formal mathematically assured methods.

The importance Polar puts on the use of formal mathematics in development led him to the computer security field, as this field demands rigor. As a result Polar's doctoral dissertation is primarily concerned with access control systems, and provides the formal mathematics behind them..

Polar has built many systems in the past, some for the government. At PAR Technology, Government Systems Group, Polar orchestrated the systems side and graphical user interface for the AFES (Automatic Feature Extraction System). This system is a graphical system that analyzes stereo areal photography and is able to learn and recognize 3-D land based features such as buildings, their heights, and other objects such as planes and vehicles. This system, in its day, needed unprecedented processing power, storage, and graphics capability, for which he made modifications to the Unix kernel. At PAR he was also involved in building logical support decision tools for commanders in the field.

In a short stint in Australia, Polar built the communication engine for a new brand of ATMs being deployed there. Getting that job done under time and budget, he developed a BCPL language interpreter for the ATM that could be run on the development processors. This effort lessened the application programmers' debugging burden.

In graduate school, he was involved heavily in the promotion and development of functional and logic programming languages, notably the Haskell programming language. He designed and built formal logic interpreters that integrated the Haskell language with logic programming (Prolog).

At Odyssey Research Associates, Polar was instrumental in building distributed network systems, and formally analyzing them for assurance and security. This effort led to his involvement with the Object Management Group (OMG), which is an international standards organization for the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard, among others.

He is also the principal owner of Adiron, LLC, which is a small business that developed and sold security tools and solutions for the Java/CORBA market. At this time, Adiron, LLC is now the corporate vehicle for Polar's consulting contracts. Prior to Adiron, Polar served as Chief Architect and part owner at a start up company called Blackwatch Technology. This company performed computer security research and development for companies such as Tandem (now Compaq/HP), Entrust, Nortel, and 3Com.

During an earlier time at Syracuse University, Polar served as a Research Associate at Syracuse University in the Center for Computer Applications and Software Engineering (CASE Center) and the Systems Assurance Institute (SAI). There he headed a research group focused on distributed security, until funding ended in 2006.

Polar in affiliation with each Odyssey Research, Blackwatch, Adiron, and Syracuse University was an active member of the Object Management Group (OMG). He was also a member of the OASIS group, which is a standards consortium of businesses and academia that bases much of its work in the XML language format and its applications. He also has been invited and serves on conference program committees, such as the Distributed Object Computing Security Workshop (DOCSec), and the ACM XML Security Workshop.

At the OMG, Polar was the Chair of the OMG Security Special Interest Group (SecSIG) from 2000-2003, Chair of the OMG ATLAS Revision Task Force, and also the Chair of the OMG Security Revision Task Force (Security RTF). He is actively involved in the development of most security related specifications taken on by the OMG. He is co-author with many people from industry on OMG specifications such as the CORBA Security Service (CORBAsec), Resource Access Decision (RAD) Service, Common Secure Interoperability Version 2 (CSIv2), Authorization Token Layer Acquisition Service (ATLAS), and Security Domain Membership Management (SDMM). He presented much of his security and information assurance research performed at Syracuse University to the OMG business community. Polar uses his background in formal methods and current information assurance research to influence the various industry groups creating and writing the world wide accepted standards. During his involvement with these groups he brought formal information assurance awareness into the standards arena.

At OASIS, Polar was active in the security services XACML group. This group is heading the standardization of the Access Control Policy language that is and will be used in many commercial access control products behind web servers and application servers to control customer and business access to information. His formal background and research aided the group in formulating an access control language that will allow for logical analysis of security policy. This approach leads to the assurance that a policy written actually enforces the intent with which it is devised.

Besides his own company Adiron, LLC, Polar's last position was Director of Security and Software R&D at Wireless Grids Corporation in Syracuse, a small start-up specializing in wireless technology, until it was sold and moved its headquarters to Austin, TX.

Polar is the founder of Busme! (http://busme.us now defunct), which is a project he started in 2009 that uses mobile phones in a crowd-sourcing way to track public buses for the benefit of public transportation. This venture is now a for profit company and is working toward getting installations deployed worldwide. He is now experimenting with Reactive Systems and Microservices architecture in this endeavor.

Polar was hired at ALK Technologies in Feb 2017, which is now called Trimble MAPS, and is now part of the Trimble, Inc. empire. There he works with the design team to research better ways of doing things and the potential for new products.

Dr. Polar Humenn has B.S. M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Information Science from Syracuse University.

He has taught at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY as an Adjunct Professor in Computer Science.