Department of Computer Information Technology (CIT) Weekly Seminar

The weekly CIT seminar is being held every Friday of a semester. The seminar is designed to give students and faculty an opportunity to familiarize themselves with research and technological advanced developed within and outside of the department, as well as to provide an overview of the resources available to the students.

Date	Presenter	Description
12/3/12	Eric Katz & Rachel Sitarz	TBA
11/30/12	Suzanne Shontz	TBA
11/23/12	Thanksgiving Break	N/A
11/16/12	Feng Li, Assistant Professor, CIT@IUPUI	Title: Moving-target Defense for Cloud Systems: Lessons from Botnets Abstract: Existing reactive cyber defense technologies are not sufficient for the cloud security to counter advanced and sophisticated cyber attacks. A recent consensus on the game-changing theme to cyber security is the Moving Target Defense (MTD). The MTD aims at changing the unevenness between attack and defense costs due to the static nature in current systems. There are several recent innovative security research attempts on host and program dynamics to increase the complexity for attackers. In this talk, we will first review the state-of-art research works on MTD in several different security research areas. Although the research on MTD is in the early stage, attackers have already accumulated valuable experiences and knowledge in this area. The history of the botnet vividly represents the evolution from static to moving distributed organization. Therefore, our research objective is to design an innovative MTD framework to improve cloud resiliency and survivability, by developing the adversaries' accumulated knowledge reflected in botnet designs. The MTD scheme achieves cloud-level polymorphism and security agility by simultaneously and locally coordinated shifting in both cloud topology and data forwarding paths. This scheme will make the static cloud move to the disadvantage of the attackers, by increasing the attackers' uncertainty, difficulty, and cost in both the reconnaissance and attacking phase. I will present our MTD design and research ideas for cloud systems in this talk and hope to identify more detailed challenges through the extensive discussion. Short Bio: Dr. Feng Li is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Technology, Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, IUPUI. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University in August 2009. He has extensive research experiences in the areas of cyber security, wireless mobile networks, cloud computing, and trust management. He has published more than 30 papers in top conferences including INFOCOM and ICDCS, and journals such as IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. He currently serves on the technical program committee of INFOCOM 2013 and the organizing committee of ICDCS 2013 (Publication Co-Chair). He has served in the past and continues to serve on different conference program committees, including INFOCOM 2010, 2011, and 2012. He is a member of IEEE ComSoc and ASEE, and also member of the AFRL CyberBAT team.
11/8/12	Amir Michael & John O'Hara, Facebook	Title: Seminar Announcing Student Competition Open Compute Project - Challenge to Build the Most Efficient Computing Infrastructures at the Lowest Possible Cost. Sponsored by Facebook, The Purdue Homeland Security Institute and Tech Ventures, Intel, and Goldman Sachs. Abstract: Connect with one of the World’s largest, complex and most dynamic IT companies. Founded in 2004, Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them. The Open Compute Project is a rapidly growing community of engineers around the world whose mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing. We believe that openly sharing ideas, specifications and other intellectual property is the key to maximizing innovation and reducing operational complexity in the scalable computing space. The Open Compute Project Foundation provides a structure in which individuals and organizations can share their intellectual property with Open Compute Projects.
11/2/12	Tosin Ogunwuyi (CNIT graduate student) and Suruchi Shah (CNIT undergraduate student)	Title: Summary of Purdue CoT First Cohort Experiences to Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Abstract: Purdue made an impressive impact on Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), held October 3-6, 2012 in Baltimore, MD. GHC 2012 recognized Purdue for having the 5th highest number of students in attendance, with CoT contributed 20 of the 29 students. Brandeis Marshall, Dawn Laux, Fatma Mili, Alka Harriger, Julie Mariga and Linda Young were CIT faculty/staff mentors to the CoT undergraduate and graduate student attendees. Several of the CoT cohort will share their experiences from the sessions attended to the career fair networking opportunities.
10/29/12	Juan Gilbert, IDEaS Professor, Clemson University	Title: Universal Design in Electronic Voting: Making Voting More Accessible and Secure Abstract: Subsequent to the debacle of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, it became abundantly clear that America’s archaic voting system was in dire need of a major overhaul. Consequently, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines were purchased by several states. The use of these machines has not been without controversy with respect to security, trust and ease of use. Professors and security research teams have found several vulnerabilities in current voting technologies. In 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was created to provide all citizens equal access to participate in the electoral process, regardless of ability. The Prime III voting system, http://www.PrimeVotingSystem.com , is a secure, multimodal electronic voting system that takes a universal design approach to address security, trust and ease of use. Dr. Gilbert and his research team were recently awarded a $4.5 million dollar grant from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to conduct research on accessible voting technologies, see http://www.AccessibleVoting.org Bio: Dr. Juan E. Gilbert is an IDEaS Professor and Chair of the Human-Centered Computing Division in the School of Computing at Clemson University where he leads the HCC Lab. He is also a Professor in the Automotive Engineering Department at Clemson University. Dr. Gilbert is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement Science (AAAS), an ACM Distinguished Scientist, National Associate of the National Research Council of the National Academies, an ACM Distinguished Speaker and a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society. In 2011, Dr. Gilbert was given a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Engineering and Mathematics Mentoring by President Barack Obama.
10/12/12	Shouhuai Xu, Associate Professor, CS@University of Texas at San Antonio	Title: Cyber Security Dynamics Abstract: For decades, Computer and Information security studies have been driven by concepts such as Confidentiality, Integrity, and Authentication. These concepts and the resulting body of knowledge are necessary, but not sufficient, for the emerging discipline of Cyber Security, which would need a new body of knowledge and possibly a new foundation. In this talk, I will present some preliminary results in this direction. The results are centered on the novel concept we call Cyber Security Dynamics, which has a great potential to become one of the cornerstone concepts that may drive the understanding and study of Cyber Security. I will also discuss some challenging open problems. Bio: Dr. Shouhuai Xu is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at San Antonio. His research is primarily in making cyberspace more secure and trustworthy. He is especially interested in mathematical modeling and analysis of macroscopic cyber security, and devising microscopic practical mechanisms including provably-secure cryptographic protocols to counter advanced cyber-attacks (including malware). His research has been funded by AFOSR, ARO, NSF and ONR. He has served on the Program Committees of 60+ international conferences and workshops. He is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC), and of International Journal of Security and Networks (IJSN). He earned his PhD in Computer Science from Fudan University. Please refer to www.cs.utsa.edu/~shxu for more information about his research.
10/5/12	Anthony Smith, Associate Professor, CIT	Title: Radios, investment markets, innovation, and commercialization" or "the hard way to (hopefully, eventually) make a buck Abstract: Broadband Antenna Tracking Systems is one of the most successful companies to emerge from the College of Technology. From initial idea, to proof of concept, to the maize of Intellectual Property (IP) and investors, this seminar will discuss taking an idea for a product to a fully functioning company selling high-tech products. And yes, you may learn a little about radio data communications along the way. Rated R, not for the faint of heart, and plenty of coffee recommended beforehand.
9/28/12	Ji Hyeon Hong, Grad Student, CIT	Title: NL-Based Communication with Firefighting Robots Abstract: Firefighters put themselves in harm’s way while saving others and may even lose their lives in certain situations, such as toxic fumes, extreme heat, or inhaling smoke. In order to protect firefighters from the risks and, at the same time, to save others’ lives, firefighting and firefighter assistant robots have been developed. This talk will compare different firefighting and firefighter assistant robots and their functionalities. The main thrust of the talk, however, is to discuss the transition from tele-operated robots first to voice-operated and, eventually, to fully autonomous ones, which is where robotic intelligence resides. We will introduce HARMS, the human-agent-robot- machine-sensor collaborative effort, and explain why using natural language as the basis of their communication is not only optimal but also feasible and affordable with the Ontological Semantic Technology.
9/21/12	Anuya Ghanekar, Grad Student, CIT	Title: Finding Betweenness in Dense Unweighted Graphs
9/14/12	Victor Raskin, Distinguished Professor, English & Linguistics	Title: Applications of Natural Language Processing to Cybersecurity Abstract: The field of information security (cybersecurity) is multidisciplinary and involves computer science and engineering, computer and information technology, information science, computational linguistics, psychology, sociology, political science, biology and quite a few others. The informal focus on the speaker's own work on natural language information assurance and security. Natural language processing is the science of building various computational applications that replace or aid humans in dealing with large massives of natural language text. Historically, it has ranged from machine translation to information retrieval and extraction, summarization, text mining, search to discovery. We ported the technology into information security (mostly assurance) at CERIAS slightly over a decade ago. We implemented a range of applications from the watermarking and tamper proofing of natural language file to semantic forensics, the detection of contradictions and possible deception in text. The talk will go over these and possibly other NL IAS applications.
9/7/12	Michael Kane, Associate Professor, CIT	Title: Data Management in Personalized Medicine