Apply…
Begin the application process (deadline: March 9th, 2012)
The Program…
The CERIAS Information Security REU Program provides the opportunity for undergraduate students to engage in the forefront of information security research working on individual project areas. Some areas include:
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The Cloud’s DNA [+]When conducting research, life scientists rely heavily on clinically annotated specimens, and the most thorough and effective clinical annotations contain information that is found in the electronic health records (EHRs) for the human subjects that are participating in the scientists’ studies. One primary piece of legislation pertinent to electronic health records is the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, 1996). To protect the privacy of the human subjects, HIPAA dictates differing levels of access to the information found in the EHRs based on the roles that researchers play in a particular study; these levels vary from full access (including protected health information) to very limited (i.e., public) access. In the case of public access, the data must be de-identified based on criteria elucidated in the HIPAA legislation, and some of these criteria are stated in a general fashion to reflect the fluid nature of modern science. Due to these ambiguities, the complex measures that are often necessary to de-identify protected health information, and the risk of litigation and lost reputation, scientists rarely share their de-identified annotated data beyond their current study. Unfortunately, this lack of sharing negatively impacts the reuse of experimental data beyond its current context, and in turn, this lack of reuse can adversely affect the translational impact of basic life sciences.
In contrast to this constricting approach to the management of clinical annotations is the move in computing toward the “Cloud” wherein data are stored for easy retrieval and sharing. In our current study, we are surveying life scientists to ascertain their perceptions of a cloud-based approach to the management of their annotated data.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). (1996). Retrieved July 10, 2009 from http://www.cms.hhs.gov/HIPAAGenInfo/Downloads/HIPAALaw.pdf.
Undergraduate Research Project:
The undergraduate student will conduct a comprehensive literature review and perform an analysis of the large data repositories frequently used in the life sciences. There are several large repositories. The Susan B. Komen Virtual Tissue Bank is one example. The Komen Virutal Tissue Bank is the only repository in the world for normal breast tissue and matched serum, plasma and DNA. By studying normal tissue, we accelerate research for the causes and prevention of breast cancer. To more deeply understand the evolution of the disease, it is necessary to compare abnormal, cancerous tissue against normal, healthy tissue. Student research projects include:
• Characterization of how these large data repositories handle the sensitivity and privacy of the information they store.
• Best practices for designing proteomic, genomic and metabalomic databases to enable data sharing and reuse while managing privacy and security requirements.
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Detecting Patterns of Humor [+]According to Raskin’s (1985) hypothesis, all verbal humor is based on the full or partial compatibility of a humorous text with two opposing scripts. Within this general recipe, other components of the joke allow for numerous variations of humorous techniques that individualize the humor authors and deliverers (writers, comedians, etc.). This makes it possible to use humor analysis in order to attribute a text to a certain individual, and important IAS technique. This study is an early step in this direction, so several possible variations of it will be negotiated to fit a student’s own interests and strengths. What we are particularly interested in is what information is not stated explicitly in a joke because it is supposed to be familiar to the hearer/reader and what has to be added as new information. By changing the ratio between what is explicit and what is implicit, one can manipulate the length, verbosity, and style-genre of the joke, thus enriching and manipulating the established patterns in humor, which will contribute to the computational identification of individual humor styles.
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Quantifying Informativeness and Novelty of Text [+]The study is a continuation of ongoing work on determining how new and informative a new text is in relation to the ones already processed by the system. It is part of a computational semantic approach to develop computer applications that closely emulate human language and information processing ability. The possibility to develop an Internet search that is much more intelligent that Google because it actually understands the user’s query rather than just searching for the character strings is quite exciting, and this is only one of the numerous ways, many of them cyber security related, that an advanced notion of informativeness can improve in our understanding of and emulating the human mind. We will compare new texts to old ones in order to discover what exactly makes a new text seem informative in relation to some old texts but not others. Our purpose will be to formulate computational rules and regularities that are useful for the task.
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Detecting Script-Underlying Recurring Situations in Text [+]An exciting property in human language and information processing activity is our ability to aggregate separate statements into larger chunks of information that frequently recur, are familiar, and become associated with standard routines, such as going to a restaurant or boarding a plane. The current computational implementations of language and information processing do not yet have this capability. We will look at various examples of such chunks of information, often referred to as scripts, and figure out how we, humans, recognize them after seeing just a phrase or two and think about programming the computer to do the same.
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A security-enabled interface for humanoid robot-to-robot communication, within a HARMS Model. [+]Inter-robot communication interfaces a number of robots, working in a common task domain. In the case of mobile, autonomous robots the communications medium between the robots is wireless and therefore subject to security compromises. To provide a secure interface between robots a secure layer can be added to a HARMS Model (Humans, software Agents, Robots, Machines, Sensors). In this research project, humanoid robots will be used and a secure module will be added to HARMS networking and communication layers, to enable the robots to work as a team and be insulated from malicious intrusion or dereliction of task, due to external, unsafe influence.
Program Details…
- Duration: 8 weeks (5/29/2012 - 7/20/2012)
- Stipend: $500/weekly
- Housing, meals and travel provided
- Weekly pizza seminar series
- Midterm and final mini-symposium
- Tour the IAS labs on campus
- Social Events
Housing
Where…
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
Nondiscrimination Policy Statement
http://www.purdue.edu/purdue/ea_eou_statement.html
This program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation under grant number 1062970.
