Scott Freitas
I’m a Principal Applied Scientist at Microsoft working at the intersection of applied and theoretical machine learning, with a focus on graph mining and deep learning.
My goal is to develop explainable, robust, and efficient next-generation cybersecurity systems.
I completed my Machine Learning PhD at Georgia Tech where I worked with Polo Chau. I co-authored several winning research proposals, including a multi-million dollar DARPA grant; was awarded PhD fellowships from IBM Research, NSF GRFP and Raytheon; and was fortunate to work with amazing researchers at IBM Research, Amazon, Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection, Microsoft Research, Intel and the Naval Air Warfare Center.
Education
Dec. 2021Aug. 2018Ph.D. in Machine Learning
Aug. 2018Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Advisor:
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Thesis: Developing Robust Models, Algorithms, Databases and Tools with Applications to Cybersecurity and Healthcare
Committee:
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau,
Srijan Kumar,
Diyi Yang,
B. Aditya Prakash,
Hanghang Tong
Thesis
Thesis Recording (Proposal)
Thesis Slides
May 2018 —May 2017M.S. in Computer Science
May 2017Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Advisor:
Hanghang Tong
Thesis: Mining Marked Nodes in Large Graphs
Committee:
Hanghang Tong,
Ross Maciejewski,
Yezhou Yang
GPA: 4.00/4.00
Thesis
May 2017 —Aug. 2015B.S. in Computer Science
Aug. 2015Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Advisor:
Ross Maciejewski
Thesis: Guided Augmented Reality Tours using Landmarks and Social Media
GPA: 3.98/4.00
Thesis
Thesis Recording
May 2014 —Aug. 2010B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering
Aug. 2010Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Advisor:
James Aberle
Thesis: Multi-Stage Linear Electromagnetic Accelerator Using Optical Triggering
GPA: 3.64/4.00
Thesis
Thesis Recording
Honors and Awards
2021IBM PhD Fellowship
One of sixteen fellows; awarded for my work in developing next-generation explainable defenses
2021Nvidia Data Science Teaching Kit
Helped develop one of five Nvidia teaching kits used by educators around the world
2019Raytheon Research Fellowship
Awarded for my PhD work in adversarial machine learning
2018 — 2021NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
National Science Foundation recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in STEM fields
2018Outstanding Computer Science Masters Student (ASU)
Awarded to single master student demonstrating exemplary performance
2017Best Demo Award, Runner Up at CIKM '17
For "Rapid Analysis of Network Connectivity"
2017CIKM Travel Grant
Funding from NSF and SIGWEB to present at CIKM
2016 — 2017FURI Grant
Undergraduate research grant awarded for work in network connectivity
2016 — 2017Arizona Graduate Scholar Award
Merit scholarship awarded to select number of master students
2010 — 2014Provost's Scholarship
Merit scholarship awarded to select number of incoming undergraduate students
Industry Research Experience
Present —Sep. 2024Microsoft, Redmond, WA
Sep. 2024Principal Applied Scientist (level 65), Microsoft Security Research
• Leading research into LLM-based agents to automatically identify detection and disruption rule gaps.
• Designed and deployed TITAN, a graph-based threat intelligence framework integrated into Microsoft Defender XDR, achieving a 21% increase in incident disruption, a 1.9x reduction in response time, and 99% precision.
Paper
Blog
Microsoft Ignite Talk
• Developed an adaptive incident prioritization score that assists analysts in prioritizing security incidents for investigation.
Aug. 2024Sep. 2023Microsoft, Redmond, WA
Sep. 2023Senior Applied Scientist (level 64), Microsoft Security Research
• Led an ML research team in architecting and delivering key capabilities for our flagship AI product, Copilot for Security, including tailored recommendations for similar incidents, triaging, and remediation. Collaborated across teams to launch the product on a tight timeline.
Paper
Blog
Dataset
• Developed GraphWeaver, a geo-distributed alert correlation framework integrated into Microsoft Defender XDR, achieving 99% correlation accuracy while handling billions of security alerts across hundreds of thousands of enterprises. Reduced our singleton incident rate by 7%, translating into millions of investigation hours saved annually by SOCs.
Paper
Blog
Aug. 2023Jan. 2022Microsoft, Redmond, WA
Jan. 2022Senior Applied Scientist (level 63), Microsoft Security Research
• Developed graph-based algorithms to identify alert correlation gaps, enabling the correlation of millions of alerts into comprehensive incident stories, saving customers millions in investigation time.
• Led the development and execution of a comprehensive research integration plan, successfully help merge two billion-dollar security products, M365D and Sentinel, into Microsoft Defender XDR.
Blog
Dec. 2021 —Sep. 2021IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY
Sep. 2021Research Intern, Cyber Security Intelligence (CSI) Team
Mentor:
Teryl Taylor,
Frederico Araujo,
Jiyong Jang
Developed unsupervised graph representation learning techniques to detect suspicious activity in cloud platforms
Aug. 2021 —May 2021Amazon, Seattle, WA
May 2021Applied Scientist Intern, Fraud Detection and Risk Transaction (CTPS)
Mentor:
Hao Zheng,
Yanni Lai
Created unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches to prevent fraudulent transactions across the Amazon marketplace
May 2020 —Aug. 2020Microsoft, Redmond, WA
Aug. 2020Research Intern, Microsoft ATP + Microsoft Research
Mentor:
Karishma Sanghvi,
Yuxiao Dong
Designed semi-supervised graph neural network approach to detect malicious software
Aug. 2019 —May 2019Microsoft, Redmond, WA
May 2019Research Intern, Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
Mentor:
Andrew Wicker,
Joshua Neil
• Created first framework to model lateral attacks on enterprise networks, enabling IT admins to quantify and mitigate network vulnerability to lateral attacks
Paper
March 2015 —Dec. 2014General Dynamics, Scottsdale, AZ
Dec. 2014Systems Engineer, Mission Systems
Worked on the Integrated Threat Force team to develop and refine the communication technology systems.
Aug. 2013 —May 2013Naval Air Warfare Center, Point Mugu, CA
May 2013Research Intern, Naval Research Entperprise Internship Program (NREIP)
Mentor:
Balaji Iyer
Explored methods of preventing electromagentic interference from coupling into superconducting receivers
Academic Research Experience
Present —Aug. 2018Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Aug. 2018Graduate Research Assistant, School of Computational Science and Engineering
Mentor:
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Member of the Polo Club of Data Science where we innovate scalable, interactive, and interpretable tools that amplify human's ability to understand and interact with billion-scale data and machine learning models
May 2018 —Summer 2017Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Summer 2017Graduate Research Assistant, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering
Mentor:
Hanghang Tong
Conducted research in graph based connectivity analysis to improve local graph partitioning. Developed web-based prototype for explainable ranking in complex multi-layered networks.
Aug. 2017 —May 2017Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
May 2017Summer Research Assistant, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering
Mentor:
Ross Maciejewski
Developed interactive augmented reality (AR) graph models in the Microsoft Hololens.
May 2017 —Jan. 2016Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Jan. 2016Undergraduate Research Assistant, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering
Mentor:
Hanghang Tong
Developed fast graph mining algorithms for network connectivity analysis, and award winning web platform for visualization and analysis.
Publications
Web Scale Graph Mining for Cyber Threat Intelligence
Scott Freitas,
Amir Gharib
arXiv (arXiv). 2024.
Project
PDF
Video
BibTeX
Deployed in Microsoft Unified Security Operations Platform
Presented at Microsoft Ignite 2024
AI-Driven Guided Response for Security Operation Centers with Microsoft Copilot for Security
Scott Freitas,
Jovan Kalajdjieski,
Amir Gharib,
Rob McCann
arXiv (arXiv). 2024.
Project
PDF
Blog
Dataset
BibTeX
Deployed in Microsoft Copilot for Security product
GraphWeaver: Billion-Scale Cybersecurity Incident Correlation
Scott Freitas,
Amir Gharib
ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). Boise, Idaho, 2024.
Project
PDF
Blog
BibTeX
Deployed in Microsoft Defender XDR product
Keynote talk at CIKM Industry Day
Graph Vulnerability and Robustness: A Survey
Scott Freitas,
Diyi Yang,
Srijan Kumar,
Hanghang Tong,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE). 2022.
PDF
BibTeX
MalNet: A Large-Scale Image Database of Malicious Software
Scott Freitas,
Rahul Duggal,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). Atlanta, GA, 2022.
Demo
PDF
Dataset
Code
BibTeX
A Large-Scale Database for Graph Representation Learning
Scott Freitas,
Yuxiao Dong,
Joshua Neil,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks (NeurIPS). Virtual, 2021.
Project
Demo
PDF
Blog
Dataset
Code
BibTeX
Evaluating Graph Vulnerability and Robustness using TIGER
Scott Freitas,
Diyi Yang,
Srijan Kumar,
Hanghang Tong,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). Virtual, 2021.
PDF
Blog
Video
Code
BibTeX
Featured in Nvidia Data Science Toolkit
EnergyVis: Interactively Tracking and Exploring Energy Consumption for ML Models
Omar Shaikh,
Jon Saad-Falcon,
Austin P Wright,
Nilaksh Das,
Scott Freitas,
Omar Asensio,
Duen Horng Chau
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). Virtual, 2021.
Demo
PDF
Video
Code
BibTeX
UnMask: Adversarial Detection and Defense Through Robust Feature Alignment
Scott Freitas,
Shang-Tse Chen,
Zijie J. Wang,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). Atlanta, GA, 2020.
Project
PDF
Blog
Video
Code
BibTeX
HAR: Hardness Aware Reweighting for Imbalanced Datasets
Rahul Duggal,
Scott Freitas,
Sunny Dhamnani,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau,
Jimeng Sun
IEEE Conference on Big Data (Big Data). Orlando, USA, 2021.
PDF
Video
BibTeX
Argo Lite: Open-Source Interactive Graph Exploration and Visualization in Browsers
Siwei Li,
Zhiyan Zhou,
Anish Upadhayay,
Omar Shaikh,
Scott Freitas,
Haekyu Park,
Zijie J. Wang,
Susanta Routray,
Matthew Hull,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). Virtual, 2020.
Demo
PDF
Code
BibTeX
REST: Robust and Efficient Neural Networks for Sleep Monitoring in the Wild
Rahul Duggal*,
Scott Freitas*,
Cao Xiao,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau,
Jimeng Sun
The Web Conference (WWW). Taipei, Taiwan, 2020.
Project
PDF
Blog
Video
Code
BibTeX
* Authors contributed equally
D2M: Dynamic Defense and Modeling of Adversarial Movement in Networks
Scott Freitas,
Andrew Wicker,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau,
Joshua Neil
SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM). Cincinnati, Ohio, 2020.
Project
PDF
Blog
BibTeX
Extracting Knowledge For Adversarial Detection and Defense in Deep Learning
Scott Freitas,
Shang-Tse Chen,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
KDD Workshop: Learning and Mining for Cybersecurity (LEMINCS). Anchorage, Alaska, 2019.
PDF
BibTeX
Local Partition in Rich Graphs
Scott Freitas,
Nan Cao,
Yinglong Xia,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau,
Hanghang Tong
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). Seattle, Washington, 2018.
Project
PDF
BibTeX
X-Rank: Explainable Ranking in Complex Multi-Layered Networks
Jian Kang*,
Scott Freitas*,
Haichao Yu,
Yinglong Xia,
Hanghang Tong
ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). Turin, Italy, 2018.
Project
PDF
BibTeX
* Authors contributed equally
Rapid Analysis of Network Connectivity
Scott Freitas,
Hanghang Tong,
Nan Cao,
Yinglong Xia
ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). Singapore, 2017.
Project
PDF
Video
Code
BibTeX
Best Demo Paper, Runner up
Datasets and Tools
GUIDE:
Largest public collection of real-world cybersecurity incidents
2024 Scott Freitas, Jovan Kalajdjieski, Amir Gharib, Rob McCann
Dataset
MalNet-Image:
Largest dataset for image-based malware classification
2022 Scott Freitas, Rahul Duggal, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Dataset
MalNet-Graph:
Largest dataset for graph representation learning and classification
2021 Scott Freitas, Yuxiao Dong, Joshua Neil, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Dataset
TIGER:
Comprehensive Python toolbox to evaluate graph vulnerability and robustness
2021 Scott Freitas, Diyi Yang, Srijan Kumar, Hanghang Tong, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Code
Patents
Threat Actor Infrastructure Profiling Using a Graph and Reputation Propagation
(Filed)
2024 Scott Freitas, Amir Gharib
Microsoft
Adaptive Incident Prioritization Engine in a Security Management System
(Filed)
2024 Scott Freitas, Amir Gharib
Microsoft
Geographically Diversified Embedding-Based Guided Response to a Security Alert
(Filed)
2024 Scott Freitas, Jovan Kalajdjieski, Amir Gharib, Rob McCann
Microsoft
Cybersecurity Incident Correlation
(Filed)
2024 Scott Freitas, Amir Gharib
Microsoft
Hierarchical Representation Models
(Filed)
2023 Jovan Kalajdjieski, Scott Freitas, Amir Gharib, Rob McCann
Microsoft
Talks
Simplify your SOC with Rob Lefferts and Allie Mellen
Nov. 2024Microsoft Ignite
GraphWeaver: Billion-Scale Cybersecurity Incident Correlation
Oct. 2024Research Paper Invited for Keynote Talk at CIKM Industry Day
Clustering Process Activity in Cloud Environments using Graph Representation Learning
Dec. 2021IBM Research
Dec. 2021DARPA CHASE: Cyber-Hunting at Scale
Detecting Financial Fraud in Online Marketplaces
August 2021Amazon
Developing Robust Models, Algorithms, Databases and Tools with Applications to Cybersecurity and Healthcare
October 2021GE Research
Dec. 2021Georgia Institute of Technology
May 2021Georgia Institute of Technology
Exploring Graph Neural Networks for Malware Detection
July 2020Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection
On the Robustness and Vulnerability of Graphs
April 2020Georgia Institute of Technology
D2M: Dynamic Defense and Modeling of Adversarial Movement in Networks
Aug. 2019Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection Research Expo
Mining Marked Nodes in Large Graphs
Dec. 2018Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection Group
May 2018Arizona State University
Local Partition in Rich Graphs
Dec. 2018IEEE International Conference on Big Data
Rapid Analysis of Network Connectivity
Nov. 2017ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)
Network Connectivity Analysis and Visualization in Large Graphs
April 2017Keynote Speaker: ASU Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative (FURI)
Nov. 2016ASU FURI Research Symposium
Press
Nov. 2024"Ignite news: What's new in Microsoft Defender XDR?",
Sept. 2024"AI-Driven Guided Response for SOCs with Microsoft Copilot for Security",
August 2024"Cybersecurity incident correlation in the unified security operations platform",
Dec. 2021"Congratulations to the Newest PhDs from Georgia Tech",
June 2021"New NVIDIA Partnership Bridges Education Gap for Data Science and Machine Learning",
April 2021"ML Student Earns Prestigious IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award",
April 2021"IBM PhD Fellowship Awardees Announced",
April 2021"Accelerated Data Science in the Classroom: Teaching Analytics and Machine Learning with RAPIDS",
April 2020"Georgia Tech and Intel Awarded Multimillion-Dollar Program to Defend Against Attacks on AI",
April 2020"DARPA Snags Intel to Lead its Machine Learning Security Tech",
Feb. 2019"Raytheon Awards Two ML@GT Students Graduate Research Assistantships",
July 2018"NSF Graduate Research Fellow wants to use computer science to solve society’s toughest problems",
Grants and Funding
2021IBM PhD Fellowship
IBM Research PhD Fellowship Awardee
Funded: $95,000
2020Google Cloud Research Grant
Large Scale Malware Analysis
Funded: $5,000 Google cloud credits
2018 — 2022Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception (GARD)
DARPA Research Grant
Co-PIs:
Jason Martin,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Funded: multi-million
Helped formulate adversarial defense techniques
2018Amazon AWS Research Grant
Adversarial Re-Training and Model Vaccination for Robust Deep Learning
Funded: $5,000 AWS cloud credits
2018Nvidia GPU Grant
Defending Adversarial Attacks by Robust, Inference-time Local Linear Approximation
Funded: Nvidia Titan V GPU worth $3,000
2019Raytheon Research Fellowship
Extracting Knowledge For Adversarial Detection and Defense
Funded: $25,000
2018 — 2023NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)
Multi-level Interdiction and Assistance Modeling for Natural Disasters
Funded: Full tuition + $102,000
2016 — 2017FURI Grant
Network Connectivity Analysis and Visualization in Large Graphs
Funded: $3,000
Teaching
Spring 2021Graduate Teaching Assistant
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Data and Visual Analytics,
Instructor:
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Fall 2020Graduate Teaching Assistant
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Data and Visual Analytics,
Instructor:
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Fall 2013Undergraduate Teaching Assistant
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Fulton Undergraduate Research Experience (FSE 294),
Instructor:
Joshua Lyon
Designed and taught introductory lesson plans to new engineering students
Mentoring
Summer 2023Davinder Kaur at Microsoft
Ph.D. in Computer Science, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis
Summer 2023Joshua Feinglass at Microsoft
Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Arizona State University
Fall 2020Summer 2020Kevin Li
Summer 2020B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Fall 2020Spring 2020Omar Shaikh
Spring 2020B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Fall 2020Spring 2020Jon Saad-Falcon
Spring 2020B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Fall 2020Spring 2020Frank Zhou
Spring 2020B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Service
Hiring Committee
Microsoft Security Research (Microsoft) 2024
Microsoft Security Research Summer Interns (Microsoft) 2022-2024
Program Committee
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) at AAAI 2021
ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) at ACM CIKM 2020
Reviewer
Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD) 2021
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2021
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2021
ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2019, 2025
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2019
Technology Skills
OS and Tools: Ubuntu, Unix command line, Windows, PyCharm, Azure, Synapse, Git, Latex, AWS EC2
Programming: Python, PySpark, Kusto, SQL, Matlab, Java, C#, C++, JavaScript, HTML
Research: Machine learning, Data mining, Graph mining, Data science, Artificial intelligence, Generative AI, Large language models (LLMs), Deep learning, Computer vision, Natural language processing (NLP), Anomaly detection, Cybersecurity