Christopher M. Boner, Ph.D.

Dr. Boner started the Advanced Data Analytics division after over a decade at Metron leading project teams to develop innovative technologies in network science, machine learning, trend analysis and anomaly detection.

Machine Learning. As principal investigator (PI) and program manager (PM) for numerous projects, Dr. Boner led technical teams to research and develop novel supervised machine learning algorithms to capture threat patterns and indicators in historical data, and to apply models to identify high risk encounters in near-real time. Following successful test and evaluation, several technologies were deployed in operational customer systems. Dr. Boner has published and presented machine learning research innovations in classified conferences and proceedings.

Trend Analysis & Anomaly Detection. Dr. Boner led a number of project teams that advanced the state of the art in trend analysis and anomaly detection. Models and methods developed implement statistical hypothesis testing on a massive scale to discover significant trend deviations, even when accounting for historical volatility and seasonal patterns. Several of our technologies employ cluster and cloud solutions to parallelize computing for near real-time detection capabilities that process massive data. Deployed systems generate alerts and provide drill-down analytic functions for operators to investigate.

Network Science. Dating back to the early 2000’s, Dr. Boner collaborated with other Metron researchers to develop foundational results toward a theory of detection on networks that extends classical detection theory. Dr. Boner and his collaborators established formulas for optimal statistics, computed by fusing data from noisy, transactional (entity-link) sources, to detect the presence of threat networks and patterns. These results have been extended since by considering more complex and realistic network noise models, transactional observability models, and network dynamics. Dr. Boner has led teams to implement these theoretical advances in software sub-systems deployed to automate link discovery and network/pattern detection for our customers.

Before joining Metron in 2001, Dr. Boner was a professor of Mathematics  at Denison University.