Data science

Human beings are diverse, and their online behavior is often unpredictable. In today's data-driven world, providers of online services are collecting detailed and comprehensive server-side traces of user activity. These records or logs include detailed, timestamped logs of actions taken by users, often called clickstreams. Given their scale and level of detail, clickstreams present an enormous opportunity for research into user behavioral analysis and modeling.

Online opinions now play a pivotal role in decision making and influence a wide spectrum of our lives. Choices of restaurants at which to dine, places to stay, universities to attend, books to read, doctors to consult, and even political candidates to vote for, are largely influenced by crowdsourced opinions. However, it is estimated that up to 30% of reviews on websites are fake. As a larger part of the US economy is becoming driven by social opinions, it poses a serious risk to the general public (e.g., by getting mislead to invest on low quality products, services or doctors).

Publicly available and searchable genomic data banks could revolutionize clinical and research settings, but privacy concerns about releasing such information are currently preventing its usage. This project aims to address these concerns by providing new mechanisms by which individuals can donate their genomic information to a data bank in such a way that third parties, such as doctors or researchers, querying the data bank are guaranteed to learn only aggregate functions of the population's data that the individuals authorize.

Modern critical infrastructure relies on successful interdependent function among many different types of networks. For example, the Internet depends on access to the power grid, which in turn depends on the power-grid communication network and the energy production network. For this reason, network science researchers have begun examining the robustness of critical infrastructure as a network of networks, or a multilayer network. Research in network anomaly detection systems has focused on single network structures (specifically, the Internet as a single network).

In phishing, an attacker tries to steal sensitive information, e.g., bank/credit card account numbers, login information, etc., from Internet users. The US society and economy are increasingly dependent on the Internet and the web, which is plagued by phishing. One popular phishing method is to create a site that mimics a good site and then attract users to it via email, which is by far the most popular medium to entice unsuspecting users to the phishing site.