Illinois Receives Major U.S. Department of Defense Research Award for Secure Sharing of Information

5/12/2009

Written by

Jiawei Han
Jiawei Han

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is part of a six-university collaborative cyber security initiative that has been selected by the U.S. Department of Defense to receive a projected 7-year, $7.4 million grant.

The initiative, entitled "A Framework for Managing the Assured Information Sharing Lifecycle," received the award in the form of a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The University of Illinois portion of the work, which is expected to receive approximately $1.25 million of the award, will be led by Professor Jiawei Han of the Department of Computer Science and the Information Trust Institute (ITI) at Illinois.

Assured information sharing, or "AIS," is the ability to share information at multiple levels of classification in a dynamic and secure manner, even when multiple agencies, or even multiple nations, are involved in the information sharing. In prosecuting the global war on terror, entities such as the Department of Defense, coalition partners, and first responders all need to share information to make effective decisions, but confidentiality of sensitive information must be preserved. Traditional security policies have been based on a "need to know" approach in which various participants may have rigidly specified pre-authorizations to view specific kinds of data. The 9/11 Commission, among its recommendations for guarding against future terrorist attacks in the U.S., stated that a move from the "need to know" mentality to a flexible "need to share" mentality could improve outcomes by increasing the agility and trustworthiness of information systems.

The newly funded research initiative has been designed to help achieve that vision by defining an "AIS lifecycle (AISL)" and developing a software framework to realize it. The AISL will manage the different phases involved in the process of sharing information: information discovery and advertising; information acquisition, release, and integration; and information use and control.

Professor Han, the Illinois leader, is an expert in data mining, data warehousing, database systems, spatiotemporal data mining, stream data mining, bio-data mining, and Web mining. His other ongoing work includes a project on on-line mining of anomalous moving objects for security protection, which he is conducting in the Boeing Trusted Software Center in the Information Trust Institute at Illinois. For the new initiative, his team at Illinois will work on the information management aspects of the AISL research, by developing and prototyping new techniques for information quality management and validation, information search and integration, and information discovery and analysis. His co-PI in the effort at Illinois will be Professor ChengXiang Zhai of the Department of Computer Science, whose area of expertise spans several fields, including information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, and bioinformatics.

The other universities participating in the research coalition are Purdue University, the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

The MURI program supports basic science and engineering research at U.S. universities that is critically important to national defense. The program focuses on multidisciplinary research efforts that intersect more than one traditional science and engineering discipline.

Writers: Jenny Applequist and Jennifer C. La Montagne. Contact: Jenny Applequist, Information Trust Institute, 217/244-8920, applequi [at] iti [dot] uiuc [dot] edu.


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This story was published May 12, 2009.