While at Columbia, Stolfo has received close to $50M in funding for research that has broadly focused on
Security,
Intrusion Detection,
Anomaly Detection,
Machine Learning and includes early work in
parallel computing and
artificial intelligence. He has published or co-authored over 250 papers and has over 46,000 citations with an H-index of 102. In 1996 he proposed a project with
DARPA that applies machine learning to behavioral patterns to detect fraud or intrusion in networks. DADO, developed by in part by Stolfo, introduced the parallel computing primitive: “Broadcast, Resolve, Report”, a hardwire implemented mechanism that today is called
MapReduce. Among his earliest work, Stolfo along with colleague Greg Vesonder of
Bell Labs, developed a large-scale expert data analysis system, called ACE (Automated Cable Expertise) for the nation's phone system.
AT&T Bell Labs distributed ACE to a number of telephone wire centers to improve the management and scheduling of repairs in the local loop. Stolfo coined the term FOG computing (not to be confused with
fog computing) where technology is used “to launch
disinformation attacks against malicious insiders, preventing them from distinguishing the real sensitive customer data from fake worthless data.” In 2005 Stolfo received funding from the
Army Research Office to conduct a workshop to bring together a group of researchers to help identify a research program to focus on insider threats. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2018 "for his contributions to machine learning based cybersecurity." He was elected as an
ACM Fellow in 2019 "for contributions to machine-learning-based cybersecurity and parallel hardware for database inference systems". ==Career==