Features:                                                                     
Events:   
Thursday March 28, 2024

Faculty Lecture Series


First Talk

Speaker: Prof. Masoud Sadjadi
School of Computing and Information Sciences
Florida International University
When: Friday, October 8, 2010
Time: 2:00pm
Where: ECS 243
Topic: PIRE: An Opportunity to Engage in World-Class Collaborative Research Projects While Living abroad for 6 to 12 Weeks!

Abstract:

The Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) is a 5-year long project funded by the National Science Foundation that aims to provide international research and training experiences to its participants. Top students of all ranks from all Science and Engineering disciplines, particularly underrepresented minorities, are encouraged to apply to this program. Student participants will receive multiple perspectives in each of three different aspects of collaboration as they work with (1) local and international researchers, in (2) academic and industrial research labs, and on (3) basic and applied research projects. PIRE participants will engage not only in computer science research topics focused on transparent cyberinfrastructure enablement, but will also be exposed to challenging scientific areas of national importance such as meteorology, bioinformatics, and healthcare. During the first three years of this project, over 70 travels of 6 to 12 weeks long to national and international PIRE partner institutions have been completed by PIRE student participants who visited 20 institutions in 10 different countries including Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico in South America, Spain, France, Italy, and Netherlands in Europe, and China, India, and Japan in Asia.

Biography:

Masoud Sadjadi received the B.S. degree in hardware engineering in 1995, the M.S. degree in software engineering in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Michigan State University in 2004. Dr. Sadjadi is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University, where he has been on the faculty since 2004. He is the Co-Director of the Autonomic Computing Research Laboratory http://acrl.cis.fiu.edu/, the leader of several projects under the Latin American Grid , and the PI of FIU Partnership for International Research and Education http://pire.fiu.edu/. He has extensive experience in software development and leading large scale software projects. Currently, he is collaborating with researchers in 8 countries and is leading several international research projects. He is serving as the Program Chair for SEKE 2011 and ATC 2010. He has published more than 60 papers and is PI or Co-PI of several grants from NSF, IBM, Kaseya, TeraGrid, Amazon, and FIU for a total of over $5 million.

Second Talk

Speaker: Prof. Geoffrey Smith
School of Computing and Information Sciences
Florida International University
When: Friday, October 8, 2010
Time: 2:00pm
Where: ECS 243
Topic: New Results in Quantitative Information Flow

Abstract:

A fundamental issue in computer security is to control the flow of sensitive information. It is particularly useful to be able to address this issue quantitatively, allowing us to talk about "how much" information is flowing, and perhaps to tolerate "small" leaks that are unavoidable in practice. In this talk, I will survey recent work in quantitative information flow by the SCIS IFF (Information Flow of Florida) group. The starting point is the argument that measuring leakage using Shannon entropy does not provide satisfactory security guarantees. Focusing on the vulnerability of a secret to being guessed in one try by an adversary, we instead define leakage using Renyi's min-entropy. I will briefly present the basic theory of min-entropy leakage, and then describe some of our current efforts in this area, including results on timing attacks against cryptography, factorization of channel matrices, automatic calculation of leakage in imperative programs, and quantification of accountability.

Biography:

Geoffrey Smith completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991 from Cornell University. Since 1998, he has been a faculty member at SCIS, where he is now an Associate Professor. His research interests are centered on the theory of programming languages and computer security. For the past 15 years, he has focused particularly on the area of secure information flow, supported as PI by four NSF grants; his papers in this area have been cited over 1800 times, according to Google Scholar.

This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers HRD-0317692 and HRD-0833093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. © 2003-2010 Florida International University