CICI: UCSS: ACSP4HR: Assuring Cyber Security and Privacy for Human Resilience Research: Requirements, Framework, Architecture, Mechanisms and Prototype

Citizens live in a world of prevalent adversities, ranging from childhood trauma, to domestic violence, war, flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, terrorist attacks, acute physical injuries, motor vehicle accidents, and pandemics. These adversities affect many lives; for example, during the past decade alone, unprecedented flooding, catastrophic hurricanes, and devastating wildfires destroyed thousands of homes, vital infrastructure, and communities.

Citizens often struggle to cope with these adversities due to the trauma experienced during these events as well as the extensive recovery stress. The Human Resilience research community conducts scientific studies to (i) understand how citizens suffer from these adversities and (ii) seek effective solutions to help citizens recover or bounce back from the stress and trauma caused by these adversities.

The importance of Human Resilience research can hardly be overstated because of the large population of citizens affected. Despite this clear importance, the scientific discovery process of Human Resilience research is hindered by the lack of cyberinfrastructure support for secure, privacy-preserving, and policy-complying data sharing that would foster collaborative research.

This calls for solutions to modernizing and accelerating the scientific discovery process of Human Resilience research.

This project investigates a competent technical solution to modernizing and accelerating the scientific discovery process of Human Resilience research, by tackling a range of technical challenges including: (i) specifying the requirements of a competent cyberinfrastructure; (ii) defining a solution framework to adequately address these requirements; (iii) designing a comprehensive system architecture to fulfill the framework; (iv) investigating novel mechanisms and supporting techniques; and (v) developing a prototype system and demonstrating its usefulness. The project bolsters the scientific collaboration in the Human Resilience research community by encouraging the adoption of security and privacy into its unique scientific workflows and by pioneering a holistic security cyberinfrastructure environment spanning the entire Human Resilience research data-sharing ecosystem.

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.