The National Science Foundation recently awarded three large Frontier awards involving health and wellness, security, and effective web privacy totaling nearly $20 million. The funding will go to support collaborative multi-university research and education activities. The three Frontier projects are part of more than 110 new cybersecurity research projects being funded in 33 states with award amounts ranging from $100,000 to $10 million.
The awards went to university interdisciplinary teams with experts from computer science, business, behavioral health, health policy, and healthcare information technology. The team will work to develop usable authentication and privacy tools, develop trustworthy control of medical devices, produce effective methods to detect malware, and enable more effective use of medical information systems and networks.
One of the three large research projects just awarded “Enabling Trustworthy Cybersystems for Health and Wellness” involves Dartmouth College ($738,036), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ($400,000), Johns Hopkins University ($400,000), and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor ($399,910).
The four universities working on this research project are going to develop methods to enable clinical staff to use tablet computers in a continuous and unobtrusive way. Another goal is to manage security for healthcare devices in the home and in remote clinics without adding more work for the homeowner or clinical staff.
Investigators are developing methods to verify medical directives issued in remote devices. One approach is to segment access to medical records from mobile devices by limiting information exposure.
The second project “Rethinking Security in the Era of Cloud Computing” involves the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ($309,573), Stony Brook University ($149,449), Duke University ($142,295), North Carolina State University ($98,724) and the University of Wisconsin at Madison ($400,609).
As Mike Reiter, Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina explains, “The vast majority of cloud-related research in the computer security research community will move to cloud computing as threats to data and services are vulnerable and intensify.”
The third project involving Carnegie Mellon University ($693,716), Fordham University ($215,708), and Stanford University ($199,714) will study how to achieve effective privacy on the web by improving the usability of privacy policies.
Natural language privacy policies have become standard, but there is ample evidence that users generally do not read these policies. Today privacy notices contain a lot of boilerplate text so that most people often are recycling entire sentences and larger text fragments. The university teams will work to develop scalable technologies to semi-automatically extract key privacy decisions as users interact with difference websites.
Go to www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=128679&org=NSF&from=news for more information.