Center provides students with research opportunities
The Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science presents students with the opportunity to research methods of data collection and analysis in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security.
Researchers at the University and other academic institutions are working on methods to find patterns in large amounts of data that would give early warning of newly emerging disease outbreaks, financial fraud or radiological attack, said Fred S. Roberts, director of DIMACS.
"The message is that we all have a contribution we can make to society," he said.
Roberts conducts research for the University-led Homeland Security Center for Dynamic Data Analysis.
Roberts said the most important thing DyDAn shows students is that there are important problems that need solutions and there are career opportunities in working on those problems.
"It is not at all clear that putting all of these responsibilities into one large agency is the most efficient way to handle homeland security. It is my understanding that all aspects of the organization are being re-evaluated under the new Obama administration, and correctly so," Roberts said.
Homeland Security research at DyDAn requires a combination of math, computer science, statistics and operations research, as well as an understanding of biology, economics, sociology and physics, Roberts said.
"We are experimenting with data but not deploying the method in real-world applications," he said. "We don't have access to real data about people except what is publicly available."
The main grant to support DyDAn is for just under $2 million, Roberts said.
The program has received roughly $1.5 million for graduate student fellowships, their Port Authority project and sensor management in nuclear detection, he said.
DIMACS and DyDAn do not collect any private data, but their research primarily does involve data sets such as collections of news articles so they can experiment with their methods, Roberts said.
"A major challenge in homeland security is to sort through massive amounts of data, including financial and personal transactions — when that has been legally approved. When it hasn't been legally approved, then it goes against the fundamental principles of our democracy," he said.
If the Patriot Act and other actions under the Bush administration taught citizens anything, it is to be wary of research that collects public data, said School of Arts and Sciences sophomore Christian Kloberdanz.
Scouring the Internet for "un-American" activity is not the purpose of this research, Roberts said.
"We are not at all interested in determining behavior patterns that indicate that
someone is ‘un-American,' and our work is specifically directed at finding ways to protect against getting private information of any kind about individuals," he said. "They have the right to have their own views. Neither I nor my colleagues would want to be associated with research that was aimed at doing that."
Roberts values hearing from students and understands their anxieties about DyDAn's involvement with the DHS, he said.
"Their concerns are completely legitimate and they're shared by many of the people conducting the research," he said.
Data analysis for homeland security cannot work without attention paid to privacy, Roberts said.
The research does not infringe upon civil liberties, said Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of NJ Deborah Jacobs.
"A major focus of our DyDAn research is on privacy-preserving data analysis, and Rutgers is famous for its leading experts in privacy research," Roberts said. "We have projects that use open source data like blogs and social networking sites, and we are concerned with how one can infer missing data or identify false data. We are also researching methods for anonymizing such data so that it can be used to identify broad trends while protecting individuals' privacy."
Everything DyDAn does is open and transparent, and anyone can read what the research has produced, come to the conferences and talk to anyone involved with the Center, said University Professor Lee Clarke.
"As long as Rutgers is stringently adhering to the moral and ethical standards for which this University would base any other decision on then I have no problem with it, and I truly hope it's a successful venture for them," Kloberdanz said.
The University does not permit classified research, Clarke said.
"We prefer that these questions be considered from a scientific basis at Rutgers rather than a political one in Washington," Jacobs said.
