Alex Mahrer

Research & Engineering

My current research interests focus on addressing problems in multi-disciplinary, model-based systems engineering — though, I am continually delighted by the breadth of research here at Galois.

Background

After spending over a decade in the industry with Adventium Labs, Alex joined Galois in 2022. Most recently at Galois, Alex is serving as principal investigator on VIOLET, where he leads a semantic data integration effort funded by the Navy. He also works as a research engineer on INDIGO, a NASA project with related goals. Alex is the lead UI developer on Galois’s CAMET® suite of model-based system engineering tools, including the NASA-funded CAFFMAD tool which enables users to explore trade space analyses on design options in accordance with the principle of least-commitment design.

On DARPA’s AIMEE program, Alex applied recent advances in automata theory on Adventium’s (now Galois’s) DECIMAL project for use in the detection of emergent computation vectors in system models.
He served as tech lead on Adventium’s SLICED project which developed cross-platform tools for analyzing, visualizing, and debugging behavioral models to detect system errors early in the design process, As part of Adventium’s secure hypervisor project, Magrana Server, Alex designed and developed UI for administering Magrana Server instances across multiple platforms. In addition, Alex assisted in the development of an open source Virtual Cyber Defender Introspection Appliance (VCD-IA), enabling agentless defense of virtual machines running on the Xen hypervisor.

Alex also contributed to the design and development of Adventium’s AMBORO system, a constraint‐based network configuration optimizer developed as part of DARPA’s Mission‐oriented Resilient Clouds (MRC) program.

Alex has an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from North Dakota State University.