This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award aims to make scientific, technological and educational advances in Electronic Security and Privacy (ESP). Intellectual Merit: Advances in information technologies and social media have been accompanied by a parallel increase in online threats in the form of cyber-attacks, on-line fraud and identity theft. The technological solutions that have been proposed to address the ESP problems have not been very effective as they have often been divorced from human, social, economic and legal considerations. The UIC IGERT program addresses this critical need by creating a comprehensive research and educational program that integrates faculty expertise from diverse fields: computer science and engineering, social and behavioral sciences, business, law and public policy. Building on this combined expertise, the program will create a cross-disciplinary, collaborative research and educational platform for training graduate students to address the challenges in electronic security and privacy.
Broader Impacts: The University of Illinois at Chicago?s IGERT program is transformative in its integration of technological, legal, enterprise and public policy perspectives in electronic security and privacy education and training. The advances made in this program will have an immediate impact on millions of individuals who use digital technologies and the Web. The program will create a talent pool of scientists and technologists, thus addressing the critical gap in the technology workforce needs of the nation. Through recruitment and retention of trainees from under-represented and minority groups, this program will also promote diversity in higher education.
IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.
