{"602958":{"#nid":"602958","#data":{"type":"news","title":"ISyE Alumnus Michael Roytman: Cybersecurity, Dharma, and Coffee","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ESit down for a chat with Michael Roytman, and you\u0026rsquo;re guaranteed to have a wide-ranging and interesting conversation that may take unexpected tangents. (As an example, his LinkedIn profile says that he\u0026rsquo;s an expert at \u0026ldquo;herding cats.\u0026rdquo;)\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003ERoytman was born in the waning days of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), where his father worked as a civil engineer for the Russian government. As a youngster, he lived in Ukraine and spent summers with his grandparents in St. Petersburg, Russia.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EDuring one of these visits, his grandfather \u0026ndash; a professor of geophysics and geology \u0026ndash; gave him a computer: an IBM 5160 with yellow text and a brown screen. In order to play games on the computer, Roytman had to learn how to write the command lines. This, he said in a recent interview, \u0026ldquo;was the genesis of everything.\u0026rdquo;\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EEventually Roytman\u0026rsquo;s family immigrated to the U.S., where he earned his bachelor\u0026rsquo;s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign in 2010. While researching IE graduate programs, he heard about Georgia Tech and the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering\u0026rsquo;s No. 1 ranking. When he visited the Stewart School as an applicant, he met some of ISyE\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;legends\u0026rdquo;: John Hunter Chair and Professor Arkadi Nemirovski; Professor Alexander Shapiro; and Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow Craig Tovey \u0026ndash; who ended up being his advisor. These encounters made Roytman determined to attend ISyE.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EWhile a Ph.D. student, Roytman took his first step into entrepreneurship by developing TruckSpotting, an app that shows the location of food trucks in Atlanta. Although TruckSpotting was a fun project \u0026ndash; Roytman said he \u0026ldquo;got a lot of free food in the process\u0026rdquo; \u0026ndash; he came to realize that it was not financially scalable and sold the app, which is still in use today.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EAfter graduating from ISyE in 2012 with a master\u0026rsquo;s degree in operations research, Roytman took a position with Chicago-based firm Kenna Security, a start-up company that offers a customer-facing vulnerability and risk intelligence platform. He is currently Kenna\u0026rsquo;s chief data scientist. The Kenna Security Platform enables organizations to work cross-functionally to determine and remediate cyber risks. Kenna tracks and predicts real-world exploitations, focusing security teams on what matters most. Roytman is responsible for building out the core analytic and predictive algorithms \u0026ndash; and has earned four patents in the process.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EIn the midst of this burgeoning data science career, Roytman also has spoken at Georgia Tech\u0026rsquo;s \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.gtsaa.com\/s\/1481\/alumni\/17\/interior-wide.aspx?sid=1481\u0026amp;gid=39\u0026amp;pgid=3317\u0022\u003EExpert Jackets\u003C\/a\u003E, at conferences on cybersecurity, and published research with \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dan_Geer\u0022\u003EDan Geer\u003C\/a\u003E, the chief information security officer at In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture capital firm that invests in technologies supporting the CIA. He\u0026rsquo;s on the board of the Society of Information Risk Analysts, as well as the advisory board of CryptoMove, a two-year-old Silicon Valley start-up. He also began developing the Dharma.ai, which enables organizations to collect, understand, and use the ground-level data that informs their activities.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EDharma specifically began three years ago with a project for M\u0026eacute;decins Sans Fronti\u0026egrave;res (MSF), where Roytman\u0026rsquo;s experience with TruckSpotting came in handy. Together with Jesse Berns, a friend who was working as an epidemiologist for MSF in Iraq, Roytman pieced together an iPhone app that tracked data in refugee camps.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EEventually, Dharma.ai further evolved to enable an organization\u0026rsquo;s staff at headquarters and managers in the field to monitor activities in real time without Wi-Fi or cell phone service, which isn\u0026rsquo;t always available. Real-time information is presented with cutting-edge visualizations in the Dharma web and mobile applications. These data are available for export to Excel, or to statistical tools for deeper analysis, and can be piped into a wide range of data warehouses for sophisticated online analytics.\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003ECurrently, some significant humanitarian organizations \u0026ndash; the World Health Organization, MSF, Habitat for Humanity, and Save the Children \u0026ndash; use Dharma. The company just completed its Series A funding with $10 million coming from The Rise Fund, and was implemented in Texas after Hurricane Harvey.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EDharma is also the reason Roytman was named to Forbes magazine\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Thirty Under Thirty\u0026rdquo; in 2017.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EWhen asked what has changed for him since receiving that recognition, Roytman said, \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s a stamp of approval. It\u0026rsquo;s not like you don\u0026rsquo;t have to do your work the next day. That said, Forbes does a great job of networking the 30 Under 30 winners. I get to connect with previous winners who might know about things I don\u0026rsquo;t and ask for their input. It was like earning an MBA overnight.\u0026rdquo;\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EWith everything that Roytman has going on, it\u0026rsquo;s no surprise that he also has a side hustle that he talks about enthusiastically: coffee.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EAs Roytman tells it, he and some friends would get together on occasional Saturdays in Roytman\u0026rsquo;s apartment and roast green coffee beans in the oven, which would then be distributed to family and friends. Eventually, they were able to purchase a $30,000 full-scale industrial coffee roaster for the bargain price of $6,000, which \u0026ndash; until recently \u0026ndash; they operated out of the basement of an apartment building Roytman owns.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0026ldquo;We realized that coffee is getting increasingly more expensive and more complex,\u0026rdquo; Roytman explained. \u0026ldquo;There are companies selling their coffee for $25 per pound, but the reality is that 99 percent of consumers don\u0026rsquo;t have the machinery to extract $25 worth of value out of those beans.\u0026rdquo;\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EAs an alternative to the current coffee trends, Roytman and three friends opened a coffee shop in Back of the Yards, a blue-collar working neighborhood in Chicago that Upton Sinclair wrote about in \u003Cem\u003EThe Jungle\u003C\/em\u003E, and started selling half-pound bags of their coffee \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.sputnikroasters.com\/\u0022\u003Eonline\u003C\/a\u003E for $6.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0026ldquo;Everything is hooked up to computers, so we roast coffee as an engineer would, rather than as an artisan would, which is actually the correct way to do it,\u0026rdquo; Roytman said. \u0026ldquo;Ironically, the software for roasting like an engineer is called Artisan. It qualitatively controls the roasting process, so the result is consistent coffee, which is necessary if you\u0026rsquo;re going to scale up to opening a coffee shop.\u0026rdquo;\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EThey named their coffee company Sputnik Roasters \u0026ndash; a nod to the fact that Roytman and two of his fellow roaster friends are Soviet refugees. In addition, Roytman mentioned, \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s a reference to coffee for the masses, the proletariat if you will. Back of the Yards is a craft coffee desert, and demand is high. There are union workers going to work at five in the morning, who want to drink a cup of coffee, but their options are 7-11 or Starbucks. We want to prove that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to have good sustainable coffee shops the way gentrified neighborhoods have in communities those people don\u0026rsquo;t typically approach.\u0026rdquo;\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EWhen asked if he would ever leave cybersecurity to focus on coffee full-time, Roytman laughed. \u0026ldquo;I would be bored if I left either one, honestly. I think cybersecurity is the most important issue of our generation. We built highways in the 60s that allowed our economy to grow; now we don\u0026rsquo;t live in the physical world, we live in the digital world, and there are no highways there. There\u0026rsquo;s no infrastructure to protect traffic and to protect consumers. Cybersecurity is largely an afterthought today. We\u0026rsquo;re building that infrastructure to make sure business can be done safely.\u0026rdquo;\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ECybersecurity and coffee: This profile of Michael Roytman, who graduated from ISyE with a master\u0026#39;s degree in operations research, highlights this alum\u0026#39;s wide-ranging career interests.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Sit down for a chat with Michael Roytman, and you\u2019re guaranteed to have a wide-ranging and interesting conversation that may take unexpected tangents. (As an example, his LinkedIn profile says that he\u2019s an expert at \u201cherding cats.\u201d)  Roytman was born in t"}],"uid":"28766","created_gmt":"2018-02-27 15:58:21","changed_gmt":"2018-04-17 15:30:31","author":"Shelley Wunder-Smith","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2018-02-27T00:00:00-05:00","iso_date":"2018-02-27T00:00:00-05:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"602952":{"id":"602952","type":"image","title":"Michael Roytman at the UN compound in Erbil, Iraq in 2014. He presented the Dharma platform -- which was still being developed -- at the WHO regional HQ.","body":null,"created":"1519744164","gmt_created":"2018-02-27 15:09:24","changed":"1521674298","gmt_changed":"2018-03-21 23:18:18","alt":"Michael Roytman at the UN compound in Erbil, Iraq in 2014. He presented the Dharma platform -- which was still being developed -- at the WHO regional HQ.","file":{"fid":"230267","name":"Michael-Roytman.png","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/Michael-Roytman.png","image_full_path":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/Michael-Roytman.png","mime":"image\/png","size":1376286,"path_740":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/Michael-Roytman.png?itok=9j-SkDMy"}},"602953":{"id":"602953","type":"image","title":"Michael Roytman at Georgia Tech, preparing for his presentation to ExpertJackets.","body":null,"created":"1519744353","gmt_created":"2018-02-27 15:12:33","changed":"1519744353","gmt_changed":"2018-02-27 15:12:33","alt":"Michael Roytman at Georgia Tech, preparing for his presentation to ExpertJackets.","file":{"fid":"229813","name":"MRGT.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/MRGT.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/MRGT.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":380338,"path_740":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/MRGT.jpg?itok=xi_qTOIJ"}},"602954":{"id":"602954","type":"image","title":"Michael Roytman selling Sputnik Coffee at a Chicago farmers market.","body":null,"created":"1519744444","gmt_created":"2018-02-27 15:14:04","changed":"1519744444","gmt_changed":"2018-02-27 15:14:04","alt":"Michael Roytman selling Sputnik Coffee at a Chicago farmers market.","file":{"fid":"229814","name":"MR Sputnik.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/MR%20Sputnik.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/MR%20Sputnik.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":221361,"path_740":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/MR%20Sputnik.jpg?itok=0UNCiVtN"}}},"media_ids":["602952","602953","602954"],"groups":[{"id":"1242","name":"School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISYE)"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"177231","name":"Michael Roytman"},{"id":"426","name":"isye"},{"id":"564","name":"operations research"},{"id":"31571","name":"Alumni spotlight"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:shelley.wunder-smith@isye.gatech.edu\u0022\u003EShelley Wunder-Smith\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EStewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E404.385.4745\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["shelley.wunder-smith@isye.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}