REU Site: SURF-I: Safe, Usable, Resilient and Fair Internet

该项目在南加州大学信息科学研究所举办了一个REU网站，主题是“SURF-I：安全、可用、有弹性和公平的互联网”。REU的参与者将在一个多样化的、刺激的学术环境中工作，这个环境催生了互联网和域名系统，研究人员是人工智能、社会数据挖掘、科学工作流程和网络的领导者。REU网站的研究重点是支持网络安全、可用性、安全性和公平性的新兴趋势，因为它们与互联网通信有关。正如世界各国从当前疫情中吸取的经验教训一样，互联网传播已经渗透到日常生活中。甚至在大流行之前，人们就依赖互联网进行商业和娱乐。在大流行期间，这种依赖日益增长，以满足教育、远程医疗、运动、治理和许多其他人类需求。至关重要的是，确保所有参与者的互联网安全，提供可靠和公正的信息。REU网站的研究还将利用互联网上共享的信息，调查社会公平的复杂和及时的问题。这个REU网站有意在“安全、可用、有弹性和公平的互联网”的保护伞下提供广泛的研究主题，以吸引不同的学生群体。研究主题分为三个领域：通信基础设施和网络安全，科学实验和知识获取，以及社会数据科学。通信和网络安全主题解决了几个开放的问题：面对自然灾害或有针对性的网络攻击的弹性，与云服务器的安全通信，检测在线内容中的情感操纵语言和密码重用。这些问题的解决方法很幼稚。随着我们对互联网的依赖程度越来越高，我们需要更多系统的解决方案来增加我们通信的弹性和安全性，并保护用户免受操纵。科学实验和知识获取主题解决了数据集成、知识表示和可重用性、实体链接和知识发现等重要问题，这些问题跨越多个领域，对改进科学产品和扩大科学参与至关重要。社会数据科学主题涉及需要人工智能、数据挖掘、数据管理和统计来理解人类行为模式和偏好的重要问题。它对认知因素及其对交流的影响的新颖关注已经揭示了一些现象，这些现象可以改变社交网络向用户呈现信息的方式，以及人们利用众包的方式。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project hosts an REU Site at University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, with the theme of ``SURF-I: Safe, Usable, Resilient and Fair Internet''. REU participants will work in a diverse, stimulating academic environment that gave birth to the Internet and the domain-name system, with researchers that are leaders in AI, social data mining, scientific workflows and networking. The REU site focuses on research to support emerging trends in cybersecurity, usability, safety and fairness as they pertain to the Internet communication. As the world has all learned from the current Covid-19 pandemic experiences, Internet communication permeates the daily lives. Even before the pandemic, people relied on the Internet for business and entertainment. During the pandemic, this reliance grew to meet education, telemedicine, exercise, governance and many other human needs. It is critical to keep Internet safe and secure for all participants, offering access to reliable and unbiased information. The research at the REU site will also investigate complex and timely issues of fairness in society, leveraging information shared on the Internet.This REU site intentionally offers a wide spectrum of research themes under the umbrella of ``Safe, Usable, Resilient and Fair Internet,'' to attract diverse student population. The research topics are grouped into three areas: communication infrastructure and cybersecurity, scientific experimentation and knowledge capture, and social data science. The communication and cybersecurity theme tackles several open problems: resilience in the face of natural disasters or targeted cyberattacks, secure communication with cloud servers, detecting emotionally manipulative language in online content and password reuse. These problems have naive solutions. As our reliance on the Internet grows, we need more systematic solutions to increase resilience and security of our communication and protect users from manipulation. The scientific experimentation and knowledge capture theme addresses important problems on data integration, knowledge representation and reusability, entity linking and knowledge discovery that span over multiple domains and are critical to improve scientific products and broaden participation in science. The social data science theme deals with important problems that require AI, data mining, data management and statistics to understand human behavioral patterns and preferences. Its novel focus on cognitive factors and their impact on communication has already uncovered phenomena that can change the way social networks present information to users, and the way people leverage crowdsourcing.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.