A UMBC led team recently won a MURI award from DoD to work on “Assured Information Sharing Lifecycle”. It is an interesting mix of work on  new security models, policy driven security systems, context awareness, privacy preserving data mining, and social networking. The award really brings together many different strains of research in eBiquity, as well as some related reserach in our department. We’re just starting off, and excited about it. UMBC’s web page had a story about this, and more recently, GCN covered it.

The UMBC team is lead by Tim Finin, and includes several of us. The other participants are UIUC (led by Jiawei Han), Purdue (led by Elisa Bertino),  UTSA (led by Ravi Sandhu), UTDallas (led by Bhavani Thurasingham), Michigan (Lada Adamic).

UMBC PhD student Palanivel Kodeswaran will present his dissertation proposal on Use of Context and Policies in Declarative Networked Systems at 3:30 on Tuesday May 20 in ITE 325. Dissertation proposals are public and visitors are welcome. If you are a PhD student and are (or should be!) working on your own proposal, going to these is a good way to prepare. You can see what’s involved, what work and doesn’t and what kind of questions you can expect. See the link above for the full abstract, but here is a teaser.

“In this thesis, we propose to build a declarative framework that can reason over the requirements of applications, the current network context, operator policies, and appropriately configure the network to provide better network support for applications. … In particular, the contributions of this thesis are (i) Developing a framework for using context and policies in declarative networked systems (ii) Runtime adaptation of network configuration based on application requirements and node/operator policy (iii) Formalize cross layer interactions as opposed to ad hoc optimizations (iv) Simulation and test bed implementations to validate and evaluate proposed approach.”