Athena Labs

Athena Labs is the research arm of Athena Security Group, where we turn hard problems in cybersecurity and language intelligence into practical, production-grade solutions. Our work bridges logos (measurement, math, and method) and mission (operational outcomes for defenders): new algorithms, benchmarks, and engineering guidance that directly inform our products and managed services.

We maintain active collaborations with academia and the broader research community. Current relationships include Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and Florida Atlantic University (FAU), with research leadership from both our President & CEO Peter Worth Jr, PhD Candidate at FAU, and our Chief Scientist Dr. Ionut Cardei.

Current Research Areas

Threat & anomaly detection at scale

• Temporal/relational modeling for SOC telemetry
• Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) & topological features for intrusion patterns
• Streaming outlier detection and weak-signal fusion for early warning

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) & LLMs

• Domain-trained LLMs for CTI extraction, triage, and adversary reasoning
• Safety, provenance, and benchmarks for CTI LLMs (precision/recall on IOC, TTP, and narrative attribution)
• Efficient finetuning, RAG, and retrieval quality measurement

Language representation & compute trade-offs

• Comparative studies across TF-IDF, static embeddings, contextual encoders, and LLMs
• Accuracy/latency/cost frontiers for text classification and incident enrichment
• Model compression, quantization, and routing for SOC workloads

Security Operations alignment (SOC 2 Security Trust Criteria)

• Algorithms and pipelines that strengthen access control, monitoring, change integrity, and incident response
• Practical guidance for vulnerability management, scanning, FIM, MFA, and evidence collection

Publications

1. Word Embeddings and Semantic Spaces in Natural Language Processing
   Worth, P. J. International Journal of Intelligence Science, 13(1), 2023. DOI: 10.4236/ijis.2023.131001.
   Link: SCIRP
2. Layer Cake: On Language Representation and Compute Characteristics in Text Classification
   Worth Jr., P.; Cardei, I. International Journal of Intelligence Science, 15(4), 2025, pp. 184–262. DOI: 10.4236/ijis.2025.154010.
   Link: SCIRP

Contact: info@athenasecuritygrp.com