This project will enable trusted computing for flagship cyberinfrastructures and their vibrant scientific communities. The project will bring verification-aware languages to provide rigorous mathematical proofs that existing federated authentication implementations are correct, and make rigorous verification an integral part of developing distributed computational science.
Privacy or security mechanisms are usually designed with the generic population in mind. As such, they often fall short of supporting many under-studied or marginalized sub-populations, such as children, older adults, people with disabilities, activists, journalists, victims of crimes or domestic violence, and people from non-western or developing countries. The goal of this project is to…
Cyber warfare is fought today on an asymmetric battlefield in which the odds are often stacked in favor of an agile and anonymous adversary. Existing defensive technologies such as antivirus, intrusion detection, and code hardening toolchains can only partially level the fields. CRATE provides new tools and techniques to extract real-time human-actionable intelligence about the mission-level…
As one of the most vexing problems of the century, we are witnessing the escalating speed, scale, and level of sophistication of online deception (spear phishing and catfishing scams, personal information hunting schemes, fake content, impersonation, and disinformation on social media) that have severe consequences (ransomware attack, financial loss, and breach of private information). The…
This project targets the challenging problem of combating diverse Isolated, Malicious Activities (IMAs), or "lone wolf" attacks, such as homegrown violent extremist attacks. Although IMAs seem completely isolated from one another, without outside direction or communication, IMAs share some common traits when examined under the proper lens (e.g., from the right/relevant data sources, in the…
The United States is a world leader in technological innovation. However, as our technology has advanced, the need for cyber security experts has increased dramatically. Unfortunately, the U.S. lacks the cyber security workforce needed to manage many of the threats our society faces.
One method used to attract talented individuals to careers in cyber security has been the…
This I-Corps project will identify the commercial potential for using Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacon technology to provide new and low-cost location-based services. A BLE beacon actively broadcasts Bluetooth signals, which can be received by nearby Bluetooth-enabled smartphones. Thus, mobile applications can leverage the beacons that are installed at different locations to detect people's…
Securing cyberspace is one of the most significant challenges confronting our society today. This award to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will build on the Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program (ICSSP). The initial program recruited, prepared, and placed top-notch undergraduate level engineers into the government’s cybersecurity workforce. With this renewal, ICSSP…
People who are blind regularly use personal devices to take pictures and videos and share them with others. However, they often have no easy or independent means of assessing whether an image or video they are about to share inadvertently contains private information. For this project, an interdisciplinary team will design and evaluate an automated assistant that alerts users of privacy…
As one of the most vexing problems of the century, we are witnessing the escalating speed, scale, and level of sophistication of online deception (spear phishing and catfishing scams, personal information hunting schemes, fake content, impersonation, and disinformation on social media) that have severe consequences (ransomware attack, financial loss, and breach of private information). The…
The grant will support a National Forum on privacy and security, enabling experts to collaborate with public library representatives in an exploratory study to gather, learn, and discuss what technological mechanisms are currently in place to protect the nation’s public library patrons’ privacy. More specifically, this project seeks to identify the existence or absence of privacy…
Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the Web Conference 2024, which will be held from May 13-17 in Singapore. The Web Conference is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics related to the Web.
iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024), which will be held from May 11-16 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The conference, considered the most prestigious in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, attracts researchers and practitioners from around the globe. The theme for CHI 2024 is "Surfing the World."
Thanks to new European Union (EU) legislation, those who perform on-demand work through an app or website, such as DoorDash or Uber, will enjoy better working conditions. PhD student Zachary Kilhoffer, who spent four years working as a researcher for the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels prior to entering the iSchool's doctoral program, authored or co-authored several policy research pieces that informed the creation of the EU Platform Work Directive.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn how to recognize online deceptions and prevent the spread of elder fraud. That, in a nutshell, is the idea behind Deepcover, a free new app available for download on Apple's App Store and Google Play that aims to equip older adults with the skills they need to safely navigate the increasingly complex digital world we inhabit.
Associate Professors Yang Wang and Yun Huang are spearheading a project in collaboration with experts from the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University to help ensure emerging artificial intelligence (AI) development proceeds in a democratic manner that is mindful of underserved groups. Informatics PhD student Tanusree Sharma is also leading this initiative as a critical component of her dissertation work.
Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2023, which will be held from August 19-25 in Macao, S.A.R.
Library professionals have long held sacred the right of patrons to privacy while using library facilities, and the privilege is explicitly addressed in the American Library Association's Bill of Rights. The advent of the digital age, however, has complicated libraries' efforts to secure and protect privacy, Associate Professor Masooda Bashir has learned.
Associate Professor Jingrui He is developing computational tools to protect against leaks and/or unauthorized use of sensitive data held and distributed among Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies and other parties. Her project, "Privacy-Preserving Analytics for Non-IID Data," has been awarded a three-year, $651,927 grant from the DHS Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (CAOE).
Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at The ACM Web Conference 2023, which will be held from April 30 to May 4 in Austin, Texas. The conference is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics related to the Web.
A paper coauthored by PhD student Zhixuan (Kyrie) Zhou and Mengyi Wei, a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, received the Best Paper Award at the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-56). The conference, which was held in Maui on January 3-6, is one of the longest-standing working scientific conferences in information technology management.
How can current and future generations help to ensure that technologies are created and used ethically? One way is effectively teaching students about cybersecurity and AI ethics. Associate Professor of Information Sciences Yang Wang and colleagues from the University of Illinois and other universities are interested in the topic and have been conducting research into how to improve instruction. Notably, their research team also has two high school students.
The National Science Foundation-funded project aims to reduce online fraud among older adults, who lose billions of dollars each year. The iSchool is co-leading a two-year, $5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator phase 2 project to create digital tools that help older adults better recognize and protect themselves from online deceptions and other forms of disinformation.
Students often have difficulty estimating how well they know a topic, which can lead to inefficient learning or suboptimal educational outcomes. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang and Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch aims to improve students' ability to estimate their knowledge using artificial intelligence (AI) methods. The researchers were recently awarded a three-year, $850,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their project, "A Metacognitive Calibration Intervention Powered by Fair and Private Machine Learning."
Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing Lab, presented their research at the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 25th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2022). The conference, which brings together AI researchers from around the world, was held in Vienna, Austria, from July 23-29.
Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have built and currently lead an interdisciplinary, collaborative group of researchers at the intersection of everyday information, knowledge governance, and misinformation to address how people experience, produce, and manage misinformation in their everyday lives.
Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been awarded a $54,000 grant from RStudio, PBC to make its open-source scientific and technical publishing system Quarto more accessible. For his project, "Improving Accessible Reproducibility for Data Science Publishing System," he will collaborate with RStudio, PBC to develop and improve accessibility components of Quarto for people with and without dis/abilities.
PhD student Yuanxi Fu received scholarships for two summer institutes in cybersecurity, network analysis, and computational social science. The summer institutes, which took place in June, were hybrid events hosted by Carnegie Mellon University.
Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing Lab, will present their research at The ACM Web Conference 2022. The conference, which will be held virtually April 25-29, is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics related to the Web.
Associate Professor Yang Wang has received a one-year, $100,000 grant from Meta for his project, "Global South Citizens' Privacy Perceptions and Management of Targeted Ads on Social Media." His doctoral students Tanusree Sharma, Smirity Kaushik, and Yaman Yu will serve as co-investigators. The goal of the project is to learn from users in the Global South, with a focus on India and Bangladesh, about their experience with targeted ads.