CS Faculty Receive NSF Cyber Trust and ITR Awards

11-10-2004

Computer Science faculty recently received awards from two highly competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) programs, the Cyber Trust and the ITR program. NSF created its Cyber Trust program to promote research and leadership in the areas of cybersecurity promoting more dependable, accountable and secure systems. The first Cyber Trust funding cycle awarded a total of $30 million to 33 grants selected out of 400 submitted proposals. Two of the 33 awards went to Purdue faculty:

• Professor Cristina Nita-Rotaru, A Survivable Information Infrastructure for National Civilian Biodefense, $404,000 . This project focuses on constructing a survivable information infrastructure for the Clinicians' Biodefense Network (CBN) in national emergency situations and is a collaborative effort between Purdue, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and Telcordia.

• Professors Elisa Bertino, Ninghui Li, Melissa Dark (Technology), Victor Raskin (English) and Robert Proctor (Psychology), A Comprehensive Policy-Driven Framework for Online Privacy Protection: Integrating IT, Human, Legal and Economic Perspectives, $665,984. The proposed research will develop a comprehensive framework for protecting online privacy and explore the entire privacy policy life cycle.

NSF created the ITR program in 2000 to advance information technology research and to encourage innovative and high-payoff IT research having national priority. The program has been enormously successful as well as highly competitive. The most recent and last funding cycle of the ITR program focused on research on distributed systems, grids, and infrastructures in support of national priorities. Computer Science faculty were successful in receiving three new ITR awards, totaling $2,260,140. These three funded projects span the areas of information security, computational science, data mining, and databases and they are of a multidisciplinary nature:

• Professors Chris Clifton and Ahmed Elmagarmid, Privacy-Preserving Data Integration and Sharing, $1,000,000. The proposed research focuses on managing and integrating federated databases while controlling the disclosure of private data. The effort involves researchers from University of Washington , University of Illinois , Purdue, and the Regenstrief Institute for Healthcare.

• Professor Ananth Grama, Denovo Hierarchical Simulations of Stress Corrosion Cracking in Materials $361,140. This project focuses on gaining knowledge of initiation, evolution, inhibition, and prevention of Stress Corrosion Cracking (SCC) and is part of a multidisciplinary project involving chemists, physicists, computer scientists, and material scientists from USC, Cal Tech, and Purdue.

• Professors Elisa Bertino, Melissa Dark (Technology), Mike Atallah, Eugene Spafford, The Design and Use of Digital Identities , $900,000. The goal of the proposed research is to develop required Flexible, Multiple and Dependable Digital Identity (FMDDI) technology to address digital identity management, develop standards concerning identity management, and create a structure for identity management policy making.

Congratulations to all faculty involved!