Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi have received a $400,000 research award from the NSF Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program for a three year project to investigate how to better manage security and privacy constraints while querying semantically annotated linked data sources. The project, Policy Compliant Integration of Linked Data, is a collaboration with researchers at M.I.T. and the University of Texas at Dallas.

The ubiquity of computing technology and the Internet have created an age of big data that has the potential to greatly enhance the efficiency of our societies and the well-being of all people. The trend comes with problems that threaten to prevent or undermine the benefits. An immediate concern is how to fuse, integrate and analyze data while respecting privacy, security and usage concerns. A second issue is allowing data to remain distributed, enabling its owners to maintain and control quality as well as to enforce security and privacy policies. A final underlying challenge is helping to produce sound and useful results by assuring that systems understand the meaning of the data being integrated and analyzing access and usage policies. For some domains, like health informatics and clinical research, solving these problems will have a significant impact on society.

This project explores an approach to solving these problems by developing a policy-compliant integration system for linked healthcare data. The system models data, schemas and policies using open Web standards such as Semantic Web languages, federates queries to independent Linked Data stores based on content, provides policy enforcement by modifying incompliant queries, and uses formal methods to guarantee correctness of key components.

This project provides new approaches to solving one of the most significant problems our society faces in the 21st century: benefiting from the integration of distributed linked data while respecting security, privacy, and usage requirements. The prototype tools and systems are incorporated into our educational activities and made available to others via appropriate open source licenses.

President Obama names UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski chair of the newly created President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans.

Isaiah 6:8-10 (NIV)

8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us? ”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
9 He said, “Go and tell this people:
“‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’
10 Make the heart of this people calloused;
make their ears dull and close their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”

Reflection:

What kind of calling is this? To go and preach to those who won’t listen? The declaration of verses 9-10 on first reading feels harsh, as though a willing and soft-hearted people were turning into a hardened people. But that is not the case; rather, it is a declaration of what has been the spiritual state of Israel throughout — they have been an unwilling and obstinate people. We actually see in His sending Isaiah out to preach to such people, that God is one who persists in pursuing a hardened people. So why go and preach to hard-hearted people? Because the Lord says so. The extent of God’s love is revealed in this, that God would love and pursue those who are not receptive, who neither desire nor listen to Him.

Responding to the Transmission:

At one time, were we not also hard? We didn’t seek the Lord, we didn’t desire Him, and we were unwilling to listen. But in His unrelenting kindness and mercy, God drew us to Himself. Let’s reflect with thankfulness on the kindness and mercy of our God, who would pursue hard-hearted people such as us. And in the ways God calls us to go and preach, may we do so with God’s heart. May there be a shift in the way we view hardened acquaintances, co-workers, and friends – as we receive the Lord’s heart of compassion for them.

1. Reserve a ResponseWare session ID
2. Open the ResponsWare session for participants to connect to
3. Display the question you want your participants to answer (you can embed questions in a MS Power Point presentation or any other type of file you can display, or create questions directly in Turning Point Anywhere)
4. Press the start polling arrow in Turning Point Anywhere.
5. Press the same button to stop polling, and the results will display automatically on the screen, as well as on participants' devices.

For further information on using Turning Point Anywhere please register for a clicker workshop on the myUMBC Training group, or if you have at least 4 interested people, contact Karin Readel (readel@umbc.edu) to arrange for cohort-based training.