REU Site: Summer Undergraduate Research Internship Program at the Information Trust Institute

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The security and economic well-being of our society rests upon the trustworthiness of a vast complex of networked information systems that provide communications, computing, and control to manage our nation?s critical infrastructure systems (power, transportation, aerospace, telecommunications, health care, emergency response, banking, finance, and e-commerce). These critical infrastructure systems face enormous threats to their operation not only from malicious attacks, but also from their very nature as extremely complex, interconnected, and interdependent systems. The proposed summer REU site, at the Information Trust Institute (ITI), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advances knowledge about techniques for analyzing and improving the security, reliability, and safety of networked information systems. Intellectual Merit: This site has extensive computing resources and includes a team of senior investigators who have previous experience in collaborating with undergraduates in research projects. This effort is based upon projects in two prior highly successful summer undergraduate research internship programs that have resulted in co-authored publications. The topics of research are timely and address the important computing research problem of protecting networked information systems.Broader Impacts. A diverse group of undergraduates is learning how to conduct research and is becoming prepared to pursue graduate studies. The research teams include women and underrepresented minorities. Domestic students in this program are interacting with otherwise supported international students through their research projects and through ethics sessions. Graduate student mentors are learning mentoring skills. The educational effectiveness of the summer program, the ethics sessions, and the mentoring experiences are being assessed. The results of the assessments will be presented at conferences on computer science education and on engineering education.