Computer scientist Bhavani Thuraisingham has delivered keynote addresses at two recent conferences, traveling to Australia and Taiwan to discuss her UT Dallas team’s progress in the rapidly developing field of assured information sharing.
Her addresses looked at the various ways computer systems can protect information when someone is dealing with a range of other parties: the trustworthy, the semi-trustworthy and the untrustworthy.
“The 9/11 Commission concluded that when it comes to information sharing we need to migrate from a need-to-know to a need-to-share paradigm,” she said. “We’re working to help achieve this vision by defining an assured information sharing lifecycle and developing a framework to realize it.”
Dr. Thuraisingham’s team includes UT Dallas professors Latifur Khan, Murat Kantarcioglu and Kevin Hamlen, each of whom is addressing a different aspect of the issue.
Dr. Thuraisingham has developed a prototype system for policy-based information sharing to deal with trustworthy partners, Dr. Kantarcioglu has developed techniques based on game theory to deal with semi-trustworthy partners, Dr. Khan has developed data-mining techniques to handle defensive information operations with untrustworthy partners, and Dr. Hamlen is examining program rewriting techniques that address offensive information operations taken by an untrustworthy partner.
The team’s comprehensive framework for assured information sharing was instrumental in winning a highly competitive $7.5 million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative project in 2008 in collaboration with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Purdue University; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the University of Michigan; and UT San Antonio.
And now, as the team progresses, the work is branching in multiple directions.
“We are exploring the application of policy-based information sharing for health informatics and beginning collaborations with healthcare experts,” she said. “We are also applying semantic Web technologies for information sharing and have projects with the National Science Foundation, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. We are also beginning collaboration with Collin County in developing a system that shares unstructured data among law enforcement agencies. In addition we are teaming with medical experts and applying the techniques for information sharing among healthcare professionals.”
Dr. Thuraisingham’s most recent keynote address was at the ACM Symposium on Information, Computer & Communication in Australia earlier this month. Prior to that she spoke at the IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) Conference in Taiwan, where the forensics expert Dr. Henry Lee also gave a keynote address. This year’s ISI conference will be hosted by UT Dallas in Richardson in June.
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From left: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham at the IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference in Taiwan with Dr. Henry Lee, professor of forensic science at the University of New Haven; Dr. Hsinchun Chen, conference co-chair and professor of management information systems at the University of Arizona; and Ing-Dan Shieh, president of Taiwan’s Central Police University, which co-sponsored the conference.