DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM) received nearly $1.5 million in National Science Foundation (NSF) funding to support research into Internet data mining and information security over the next three years.

“DePaul has deep research roots in information management and Web safety research,” said CDM Dean David Miller. “We are grateful that these National Science Foundation grants will allow us to continue our work in these critical and fast-evolving areas.”

The team of Professor Bamshad Mobasher and Associate Professor Jane Cleland-Huang received NSF funding for a three-year investigation into the application of data mining techniques and recommender systems technologies within the software engineering process. This research represents a synergy between Mobasher’s work in Web mining and Cleland-Huang’s work in systems and software engineering. This is a timely project designed to address the needs of a growing number of organizations who adopt collaborative tools such as wikis and forums to gather and manage information. The proposed research is expected to deliver a robust library of algorithms and tools to augment the functionality of wikis, forums and other specialized management tools used in the requirements domain.

Two projects will be led by professors Professor Radha Jagadeesan, associate professors Corin Pitcher and James Riely. The first project, titled “Language Based Accountability,” aims to develop new models, logics, algorithms and theories for analyzing accountability-based approaches to trustworthiness.  It is designed to establish a theoretical basis for the design and analysis of accountability mechanisms and to use that theory to develop language-based techniques for statically validating auditors and accountability appliances.  These accountability tools supplement purely technology-based approaches to security with insights derived from the interplay between people and technology.

The same team also will conduct a three-year study into the issue of “stateful interfaces,” which are used to specify and verify the interaction between components of an information system in a wide variety of programming languages and distributed systems.  The goals of this project are to develop a foundational framework for stateful interfaces that add expressive power by allowing the possible interactions to change over time. 

CDM Associate Professor Daniel Mittleman, also received a grant of $76,000 from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) in the U.S. Department of Education with a companion European Union award to the Technische Universiteit Delft, Holland, to design and evaluate a cross-organizational collaboration system.  Building from the basic concepts of social networking systems, this grant supports the analysis, development, and implementation of a system that will encourage the collection of cross-organizational memory so best practices are collected, maintained and transferred to future project teams.

DePaul’s CDM has been designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Originally designated in 2005, DePaul was successfully re-evaluated against more stringent criteria and will now be included in the program until 2013. Fewer than 95 academic institutions in the United States are classified as a Center of Academic Excellence by the two government entities.

With more than 3,100 students enrolled in its undergraduate and graduate programs, CDM is one of the largest colleges of its kind in the nation. DePaul’s degree programs in tech security were among the first to launch in the Midwest. CDM also offers bachelor of sciences degrees in information assurance and security engineering that teach students the fundamentals of information security and security engineering, security infrastructure design, implementation and the impact of security requirements on a business operation. For more information on the security programs, visit www.cdm.depaul.edu.