12-12-2016 Writer(s): Kristyn Childres

Professor Elisa Bertino is part of an $80 million consortium between IBM, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense, and leading partners from industry and academia, including Purdue.

The Distributed Analytics and Information Science International Technology Alliance (DAIS ITA) will develop fundamental research required to enable secure, dynamic, semantically aware, distributed analytics for situational understanding in coalition operations.

The goal of the alliance is to improve coalition operations for military operations such as disaster relief and reconstruction. The research vision is to define the scientific theory required to build a distributed coalition intelligence to help rapidly formed teams make best use of human and machine processing capabilities when they are distributed at the edge of the network, for example in devices, sensors and people. The project’s kickoff took place last week in the United Kingdom.

Professor Bertino will focus on designing novel policy models and mechanisms that are critical for governing large-scale coalition systems involving different types of agents, including human users, robots, drones and autonomous vehicles. The envisioned policy models and mechanisms will allow one to provide guidelines and constraints for collaborative agents to carry out their missions, while at the same time allowing for flexibility required by agents when dealing with unforeseen contexts and situations.

Bertino said, “Today any mission we may think of, from cyber defense to humanitarian relief, involves a large variety of organizations and actors, often from many different countries. Big data, distributed analytics and collaborative distributed platforms are a critical tool to ensure mission success. This project will develop all the necessary technical and sociological foundations to harness the power of big data to ensure the success of today’s and tomorrow’s collaborative missions across organizations, actors and countries.”

In addition to Purdue University, project partners include IBM; the University of California, Los Angeles; University of Massachusetts Amherst; Penn State University; Raytheon BBN Technologies; Stanford University; Yale University; Airbus Group; BAE Systems; Cardiff University, Wales; Imperial College London; University of Southampton, England; and University College London.