Information Security and Data Management

We live in an information age. Information is extracted from the data that is constantly gathered about us: our likes and dislikes, our friends, our purchases. This presents us with a large number of technical, social, and policy problems:

• How do we store and organize large amounts of data?
• How do we keep our information, and the computers that hold it, safe?
• How do we analyze large datasets to extract information?
• How can data be managed to protect our privacy?
• How can specific forms of information, like intellectual property, be protected?
• How is information kept secure on the "wild west" of the Internet?
• How do we manage and secure devices like sensors that produce increasingly more data?
• How do we protect ourselves from future threats to our information society?
• How do we find what we want in all this data?

Faculty

Reda Alhajj...

does research in the areas of character recognition, biocomputing and biodata analysis, data mining, data models, data grid, mobile databases, multiagent systems, object-oriented databases, query languages, schema integration and re-engineering, view maintenance, web databases: keyword search and database selection, and XML.

John Aycock...

teaches about and researches everything nasty related to computers. In particular, he looks at spam, zombies, botnets, fraud, and malicious software; the latter includes viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and spyware.

Ken Barker...

is currently interested in Privacy Preserving Data Repositories. How can a privacy-aware database management system be built, and how can privacy be preserved when data is being mined?

Jörg Denzinger...

studies (distributed) artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. More specifically, this includes artificial intelligence, knowledge-based systems, distributed knowledge-based search, machine learning, automated deduction, multi-agent systems, coordination and cooperation concepts, learning of cooperative behavior, collaborative search, learning agents, web agents, and distributed data mining. His work has applications to many areas, like security and software testing.

Philip Fong...

is interested in language-based security, access control, and protection technologies for social computing (e.g., Facebook).

Marina L. Gavrilova...

manages the Biometrics Lab, where students work on a variety of projects from biometric identification and recognition to multi-modal systems design, biometric data synthesis, adaptive methods in biometrics, data fusion and using biometric features in security applications.

Moustafa Hammad...

researches databases. Specifically, he studies system-oriented database research, data management for stream applications and sensor networks, multimedia databases, spatio-temporal databases, and architecture-aware database design.

Mike Jacobson...

works on problems in cryptography (data security) and computational number theory, especially to do with the efficiency and security of public-key cryptosystems.

Micheal Locasto...

studies the security of computer systems. He tries to understand why it seems difficult to build secure systems and how we can get better at it. He works on software intrusion defense, debugging & software trustworthiness, and innovative approaches to information security education.".

Payman Mohassel...

works on problems in cryptography, information security and theoretical computer science. Examples of topics he is interested in are Secure multiparty computation, foundations of cryptography (e.g. topics related to encryption and authentication schemes), and data privacy.

Rei Safavi-Naini...

leads the iCORE Information Security Lab (http://icis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/. Her research interests include cryptography, network security, digital and privacy rights management and mobile and sensor security.

Renate Scheidler...

has research interests that include number theory and cryptography. More specifically, her work focuses on the development and implementation of algorithms for computing invariants of number fields and function fields as well as exploring these fields for cryptographic applications.