Chuan Yue, Ph.D. - US grants

The 21st IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN 2012) is to be held in Munich, Germany during July 30 to August 2, 2012 (http://icccn.org/icccn12/). This award provides partial assistance to approximately 10 United States-based graduate students to attend this important conference.

A Security-Integrated Computer Science Curriculum for Intensive Capacity Building

This project, at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS), will develop a security-integrated computer science curriculum in order to increase the number of students who are exposed to cybersecurity concepts and skills, and who understand the interplay between cybersecurity and other areas of computer science. A total of 12 courses will have relevant security topics integrated into them. This set includes 9 core courses and 3 electives. Existing courses will be enhanced through the use of course content modules, lab exercises, course projects, and guest lectures. In addition to making project materials publicly available, the project team will organize both a regional and a national workshop. The regional workshop will include faculty from other schools in Colorado such as UC Boulder, Colorado State, University of Denver, Colorado College, and Metropolitan State University of Denver. They will also collaborate with a number of institutions with which they have educational collaborations and institutional Memoranda of Understanding, including Otero Junior College, Lamar Community College, and Pikes Peak Community College. These schools do not currently have sufficient cybersecurity education capacity, and their programs will be significantly enhanced through the materials made available to them through this project. This project will be funded by the Division of Graduate Education through the SFS program.

The course infusions involved in this project will focus on topics related to web, cloud, system, network, and biometrics cybersecurity research. Topics addressed will include drive-by-download attacks, single-sign-on system security, biometrics-based user authentication methods, cross-site scripting, security policies, malware analysis, privacy leakage detection and prevention, and trusted platform module chips. Project evaluation will be done using a combination of mechanisms: student and instructor surveys; focus group studies; cybersecurity knowledge and skill measurements; cybersecurity course and program enrollment data; cybersecurity student club and competition team participation; cybersecurity projects, theses, dissertations, and research papers; and student placements into cybersecurity positions or cybersecurity graduate programs upon graduation.

One of the most severe and challenging threats to Internet security and privacy is phishing, which uses fake websites to steal users' online identities and sensitive information. Existing studies have evaluated younger users' susceptibility to phishing attacks, but have not paid sufficient attention to elderly users' susceptibility to phishing in realistic environments. As the elderly population in the United States and the world continues to grow rapidly, the elderly Internet user population also continues to grow, and seniors have become very attractive targets for online fraud.

Traditional forms of phishing have been prevalent for over a decade; in contrast, web single sign-on phishing is a more modern strategy, with unique characteristics that make it more profitable, insidious, and harder to detect than traditional phishing. The goal of this project is to systematically compare younger and older computer users' susceptibility to both the traditional and the newly emergent web single sign-on phishing. We build a comprehensive computer testbed that measures phishing susceptibility in a realistic environment. We hypothesize that older adults will differ from younger adults in terms of their susceptibility to both types of phishing, and that this susceptibility can be explained by differences in cognitive abilities, specifically executive functioning and decision-making skills.

The results of this project will advance our knowledge on how and why elderly users may fall victim to phishing, and will provide a solid basis for researchers to further design effective mechanisms to protect elderly users against phishing from both technical and cognitive perspectives.

Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (and associated events) will be held in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, during the week of October 21-24, 2014. This grant from the National Science Foundation funds approximately 20 US-based graduate students to attend ICNP. The goal of this funding is to broaden the audience attending the premier network protocol conference, the IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), and as a result, raise the level of interaction and the potential for new collaborations, new investigations, and higher quality research.

By supporting graduate students to attend ICNP 2014, this award increases the dissemination of the conference research results to a larger and a more diverse audience, which otherwise would not have been able to attend. This in turn will contribute to the strength and inclusiveness of the research community, and will lead to the long term health and vitalization of ICNP. In addition, giving preference in grant awards to women and underrepresented students hopefully will increase the participation among these groups. By advertising to a wide range of colleges and universities, participants from a more diverse set of institutions should be able to attend and benefit from the conference. A broad, as well as diverse population is key to the health of the research community and the discipline.

Conference attendance is a crucial part of the life of a researcher. By creating new opportunities for students - especially those from underrepresented groups - to attend a high quality conference, this project will benefit the research community in several ways. The students themselves benefit from the opportunity to meet and interact with many other researchers in a favorable setting, and from seeing research presented that may be related to what they are working on, or may inspire them to try a new direction. The research community benefits from the improvement of the students in the pipeline, and the introduction of new researcher perspectives. Additionally, everyone benefits from increased diversity of participants attending the conference.

The NSF Convergence Accelerator supports team-based, multidisciplinary efforts that address challenges of national importance and show potential for deliverables in the near future.

The broader impact/potential benefit of this Convergence Accelerator Phase I project is multifaceted. Crowdsourcing has created a vast and rapidly growing online labor market. However, today's crowdsourcing platforms cannot well support crowdworkers, job requesters, and the healthy growth of this important online labor market due to four major problems: fairness, ethics, efficiency, and trustworthiness. This project is a convergence of the research and development from multiple intellectually distinct disciplines including Computer Science, Economics & Business, and Humanities & Social Sciences. By performing fundamental research with rapid development advances through partnerships with crowdsourcing platform providers, this project will deliver techniques that can be used to create fair, ethical, efficient, and trustworthy crowdsourcing platforms to support American crowdworkers. It will also enable job requesters including researchers, companies, and government or humanitarian aid organizations to receive high-quality and trustworthy task submissions for them to confidently conduct their important studies and make important decisions. This project will actively involve students from underrepresented groups including female and minority students. It will train students on research and on producing high-quality deliverables. It will widely disseminate its results via activities such as publishing research papers and promoting the wide use of the deliverables.

This Convergence Accelerator Phase I project has significant intellectual merit. It addresses the critical interdisciplinary challenges of creating a healthy crowdsourcing labor market that is crucial to the important studies, computations, and decisions of researchers, companies, as well as government and humanitarian aid organizations. This labor market is vast and rapidly growing, but has four major problems intertwined from the fairness, ethics, efficiency, and trustworthiness perspectives in a very complicated manner. This project addresses the four major problems by performing fundamental research with rapid development advances through partnerships with crowdsourcing platform providers. It will (1) design incentive structures based on economic theory to incentivize fairness in crowdsourcing, (2) design research, training, and assessment mechanisms to incorporate ethics into crowdsourcing, (3) design machine learning models to improve the efficiency of crowdworkers, and (4) design machine learning models to securely protect both crowdworkers and job requesters. It will integrate the designed techniques at the client-side into a web browser extension, and at the server-side into some industrial partner's crowdsourcing platform. Overall, it takes a convergence approach to advance the scientific knowledge and understanding of crowdsourcing and its closely related disciplines including economics, business, humanities, social sciences, and computer science.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.