Date Posted: 10/04/2016

Deborah Estrin (CS), Nate Foster (CS), Arnaud Sahuguet (Director of the Foundry, Cornell Tech), Fred Schneider (CS), and David Shmoys (ORIE) received a $1M grant from the National Science Foundation's Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI) program.

The objective of the CICI program is to “develop and deploy security solutions that benefit the scientific community by ensuring the integrity and reliable of the end-to-end scientific workflow… Therefore, an increasing area of focus for the NSF is the development and deployment of hardware and software technologies and techniques to protect research cyberinfrastructure across every stage of the scientific workflow.” More information on the grant can be found here.

The winning proposal’s abstract is as follows:

Individuals today generate microscale data as a byproduct of their daily activities through use of mobile phones, wearable devices, and online services. The availability of microscale data creates new opportunities for solving a variety of complex planning problems at the institutional level, but it also raises concerns about security and privacy for the individual. Our ability to realize the opportunities is threatened by these concerns. We propose to develop and evaluate an architecture that allows individuals to monitor and manage sharing of their microscale data in order to maximize individual and institutional utility.

This project will develop a software framework to support the implementation of data-driven planning applications where individuals will have fine-grained control over use of their data. Work on the project will focus on: (i) creating a campus testbed capable of acquiring microscale data streams from sources such as wireless access points, card readers, room sensors, and point-of-sale systems; (ii) building a data management platform that offers flexible controls for imposing use-based restrictions on queries and transformations of microscale data; (iii) developing applications that use microscale data to solve practical planning problems related to transportation, space, and food in a campus setting. Having an open-source platform that addresses fundamental security and privacy challenges for microscale data has the potential for large impact on real applications and industry. Under the auspices of this funding, the investigators will also develop masters-level projects on microscale data-driven planning, providing the next generation of engineers with training in an emerging interdisciplinary area.