Faculty Directory

Dr. Josef Schaff currently works for Naval Air Systems Command in several roles that include advanced technology research in experimental mathematics for collaborative swarm control and large-scale self-organizing networks, support of DARPA collaborative autonomy and cyber programs, avionics Cyber engineer, as well as resilient open architectures.

He has supported the Navy as both government (22 years) and contractor (3 years) for twenty-five years total and worked on a variety of air, sea, and advanced technology programs. During this time, he has contributed hardware and software concepts for artificial intelligence, network security, architectures and systems development. He has had several cryptographic and distributed computing patents pending.

Prior industry work has included telecommunications, gaming software, and robotics software design. He has been involved in two start-up companies, one as the software engineer for a robotics company, and the other in big data analytics, where he headed an R&D team in complex adaptive systems for semantic data extraction and classification. He earned his BS in Science with physics concentration, and MS in Engineering, both from Penn State. He earned a Doctorate focused on Cybersecurity and on deterministic chaos solutions for self-organizing autonomous swarms. He is currently researching adaptive fractal-based topology solutions for resilient self-organizing ad-hoc networks, as well as the filtering of relevant distributed information from big data sources.