Nathaniel Bastian

Nathaniel Bastian is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Data Analytics and Business Analytics at Pennsylvania State University's Smeal College of Business. He specializes in artificial intelligence foundations and applications, with a focus on defense, cybersecurity, and data-driven decision systems.

Research Focus: His work spans stochastic optimization, federated machine learning, uncertainty modeling, multimodal data fusion, and generative AI. Key application domains include military systems, national security, IoT infrastructure, healthcare analytics, and financial technology.

Funded Projects: Principal investigator for six defense/AI initiatives:

• Generative Methods for Cyber (NSA)
• Evaluating Model Robustness to ML Data Contamination Attacks (Army C5ISR)
• Assessment of Intelligent Autonomous Cyber Decision-Support Systems (Army C5ISR)
• Enabling Safe Reinforcement Learning (ARL)
• Principles of Robust Learning and Inference (ARL)
• Optimization for Learning and Decision Making (ARL)

Publication Trends: Recent articles (2020-2021) demonstrate strong emphasis on AI robustness in high-stakes domains: 85% focus on cybersecurity/defense applications, with recurring themes of uncertainty quantification, adversarial resilience, and military AI systems. Methodological contributions center on Bayesian networks, generative models, and ensemble techniques.

Instructional Activities: Teaches graduate courses on analytics implementation (BAN 888) and data-driven decision frameworks (DAAN 881).