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

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.