Abstract

CANCELLED

April 17, 2006

Title: TRUST: in Cyberspace and Beyond
Presented by: S. Shankar Sastry
Director, Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society
NEC Dist Prof of EECS and Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

There is an alarming increase in the number of virus and worm attacks, phishing e-mails and identity theft both on the internet and in physical infrastructures. Indeed, cyberspace has several features of lawlessness which make it difficult for us to mirror societal trust relationships into cyberspace. A cursory examination of the issues involved in an issue like phishing or electronic voting reveals that the problems that we are confronting have both a technology and a policy component. Furthermore, with our increased dependency on computing and communication to instrument physical infrastructures, such as electric power, water, gas, etc., we find that they are vulnerable to information attack as well. To address these grand challenge societal problems, in June 2005, the NSF has established a Science and Technology Center entitled "TRUST: Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies" between Berkeley (lead), CMU, Cornell, Stanford and Vanderbilt with outreach partners at San Jose State, Mills College and Smith College. In this talk, I will give you a snapshot of the kinds of research, education, technology transfer, privacy, and policy work that we have under way. Rather than present a smorgasbord of work at the Center I will give a few selected examples of the work, technology transfer, and impact that the Center has already had in its first six months.