About the Topic: The Internet in 2014 is a marvelous communication utility. It provides cheap and fast transfer of information to and from most places on or near the surface of Earth. It also regularly betrays that information to curious onlookers, commercial entities, criminals, and governments.  We will explore the origins of the Internet, the workings of its core protocols, exploits which take advantage of those protocols, and feeble attempts to make those protocols secure. In sum, we will describe the devolution of the Internet from a peaceful commons to the jungle it is today.

About the Speaker: Tom Berson is a CISAC affiliate and the founder of Anagram Laboratories. He is a cryptographer who views cryptography broadly as the science and ethics of trust and betrayal. He has spent his career working both the defensive and the offensive sides of the information security battle and is attracted most strongly to security issues raised at the confluence of technology, business, and world events.

Tom is a student of Sun Tzu’s Art of War and its applicability to modern information conflict. He was the first person to be named a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. His citation reads, “For visionary and essential service and for numerous valuable contributions to the technical, social, and commercial development of cryptology and security.” He was an editor of the Journal of Cryptology for fourteen years. He is a Past-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy.

Tom earned a B.S. in physics from the State University of New York in 1967 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of London in 1977. He was a Visiting Fellow in Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, and is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Tom has been a member of several National Research Council committees: including the Committee on Computer Security in the Department of Energy, the Committee to Review DoD C4I Plans and Programs, and the Committee on Offensive Information Warfare. 

More information TBA.

More information TBA. 

Abstract:

Nipah virus lives in large fruit bats in South and Southeast Asia. When people become infected with Nipah virus over half of them die. Nipah virus can also be transmitted from person to person. This talk will describe how this bat virus occasionally infects human populations and causes outbreaks through person-to-person transmission. It will explore the risk of a global pandemic of Nipah virus and consider appropriate policy responses.

Speaker bio:

Stephen Luby is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine; Deputy Director for Research at the Center for Global Health Innovation; Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

Dr. Luby studied philosophy and earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Creighton University. Dr. Luby earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester-Strong Memorial Hospital. He studied epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Luby's former positions include leading the Epidemiology Unit of the Community Health Sciences Department at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan for 5 years and working as a Medical Epidemiologist in the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exploring causes and prevention of diarrheal disease in settings where diarrhea is a leading cause of childhood death.  Immediately prior to his current appointment, Dr. Luby served for eight years at the International Centre for Diarrheal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), where he directed the Centre for Communicable Diseases. Dr. Luby was seconded from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and was the Country Director for CDC in Bangladesh.

Dr. Luby's research has focused on clarifying the burden of several communicable diseases in low income countries and developing and evaluating practical strategies to mitigate their impact. He is currently exploring circumstances where economic and political forces encourage environmental degradation that exerts substantial disease burden in low income countries, with a view to developing and evaluating interventions.

Africa (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2013): USAID and the UN's World Food Program have proposed strategies for allocating ready-to-use (therapeutic and supplementary) foods to children in developing countries. Analysis is needed to investigate whether there are better alternatives. We use a longitudinal data set of 5657 children from Bwamanda to construct a statistical model that tracks each child's height and weight  throughout the first five years of life. We embed this model into an optimization framework that chooses which individual children should receive food based on a child's sex, age, height and weight, to minimize the mean number of disability-adjusted life years per child subject to a budget constraint. Our proposed policy compares favorably to those proposed by the aid groups. Time permitting, we will also discuss a recent analysis of a nutrition program in Guatemala that quantifies the age dependence in the impact of supplementary food, and develops a food allocation policy that exploits this age dependence and reduces child stunting.

India: Motivated by India's nationwide biometric program for social inclusion, we analyze verification (i.e., one-to-one matching) in the case where we possess 12 similarity scores (for 10 fingerprints and two irises) between a resident's biometric images at enrollment and his biometric images during his first verification. At subsequent verifications, we allow individualized strategies based on these 12 scores: we acquire a subset of the 12 images, get new scores for this subset that quantify the similarity to the corresponding enrollment images, and use the likelihood ratio to decide whether a resident is genuine or an imposter. Compared to the policy currently used in India, our proposed policy provides a five-log (i.e., 100,000-fold) reduction in the false reject rate while only increasing the mean delay from 31 to 38 seconds.

A full speaker bio is available on CISAC's website.