Purdue and IBM Open Collaboration Research

12-14-2006



The Purdue Privacy and Security Policy Management researchers from left to right: Prathima Rao, Dan Lin, Qihua Wang, Professor Elisa Bertino. Professor Ninghui Li, and Qun Ni.

A team of Purdue Researchers led by Professors Elisa Bertino and Ninghui Li recently joined a collaboration project with researchers from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and Carnegie Mellon University.  This project focuses on Privacy and Security Policy Management and is funded by the Open Collaboration Research (OCR) program, recently established by IBM.  The OCR program has the goal of exploring new open research model of collaboration with academic institutions. The guidelines set by this program overcome the challenges of Intellectual Property that universities and industry collaborators faced in the past. This allows the results of specific industry-university research to become open source software code and any intellectual property derived from those results would be openly published or made available royalty-free.

Purdue Computer Science Prof. and Head Susanne Hambrusch sees the positive effects this type of collaboration has on the CS program at Purdue. She said, "It is very exciting to see two of our faculty as leaders in IBM's OCR initiative. This program is based on a very promising approach and I believe it is the beginning of productive relationships for IBM with other universities. Given our strength and expertise in information security, it is not surprising that Purdue was selected."

Purdue University along with Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Davis has joined in the IBM OCR.

Initial IBM OCR projects address challenging research topics with important applications in a large number of domains. Details of the topics are:

• Privacy and Security Policy Management (Carnegie Mellon University and Purdue University): The team will address the difficult problems faced by organizations in creating and managing end-to-end privacy and security solutions covering all types of data and work to drive the adoption of the open standards needed to achieve this.

• Software Quality (Rutgers University and University of California at Berkeley):  The collaboration will develop program analysis techniques and tools for detecting and correcting software defects before they reach customers, focusing on industrial-size framework-based software systems that pose new challenges in their size and complexity.

• Mathematical Optimization Software (Carnegie Mellon University and University of California at Davis): The collaboration is intended to significantly advance the size and scope of industrial problems that can be solved with mathematical optimization software.

• Clinical Decision Support (Columbia University and Georgia Institute of Technology): The collaboration will include computer scientists and clinicians working in a variety of settings to create easy to use tools and interfaces for clinical decision support, removing barriers to IT adoption in this area.

Purdue researchers involved in the Privacy and Security Policy Management project include Professors Elisa Bertino and Ninghui Li; PhD students, Qun Ni, Prathima Rao, and Qihua Wang; and Postdoc, Dan Lin. The Purdue team, in collaboration with the IBM team and the CMU team, is focusing on topics dealing with fine-grained access control techniques and applications to databases, analysis tools for access control policies, and privacy-aware role-based access control.

"The OCR project is a tremendous opportunity for developing research that will have an important impact on how computer security is managed" said Prof. Bertino "The combined expertise of the three teams involved in the project is a key to develop solutions encompassing all aspects involved in security policy management".

"The OCR project will also provide a great educational experience for students" said Prof. Li "They will be able to interact with and learn from researchers with different perspectives on the research problem as well as expertise in a wide range of areas related to the problem."

Read the New York Times story to learn more (PDF)