Li and Qi Receive IBM Grant

04-03-2013

  

Two Purdue Computer Science faculty members are the recipients of a research grant from IBM. Associate Professor Ninghui Li (photo at top) and Assistant Professor Yuan (Alan) Qi (photo at bottom) received this grant for the project Analytics for Insider Threat Detection and Prevention – for which they are both co-principal investigators.

Li, who joined the Department of Computer Science in 2003, has research interests in computer security and applied cryptography, e.g., security and privacy in distributed systems, networks, databases, and electronic commerce, with a focus on access control. Qi, with the Department since 2007, is also Statistics and (by courtesy) Biological Sciences faculty. His research interests include Bayesian learning, computational biology, and other applications of machine learning.

According to Li and Qi, the joint project for which this grant was awarded "aims to develop new machine learning models and techniques which will fundamentally alter how we approach the problem of detecting insider threats. The research focuses on addressing key challenges for adoption such as accuracy, dynamic models, and real-time alerting. The project will validate and tune analytics on real-world data to develop techniques which significantly impact how security policies are defined and how we can effectively monitor user access to sensitive assets."

Congratulations to Professors Ninghui Li and Alan Qi on this award!