The Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) is pleased to announce the recipients of our 2017 research grants. In total, 27 different groups of researchers will share a total of nearly $1 million in funding.
The projects span a wide range of topics related to cybersecurity, including new methods for making crypto-currencies more secure; protecting health information stored on mobile devices; teaching high-school computer science students how to “program for privacy”; and exploring potential limits on the use of digital controls in nuclear reactors.
“It is great to see the diversity of grantees studying forward-leaning issues, from machine learning and artificial intelligence to new regulatory regimes for cybersecurity,” said Betsy Cooper, Executive Director of CLTC. “We are also very excited to welcome a host of new grantees into the CLTC family.”
The purpose of CLTC’s research funding is to not only address the most interesting and complex challenges of today’s socio-technical security environment, but also grapple with the broader challenges of the next decade’s environment. Research initiatives were sought in emerging areas like cyber risk and insurance; the security implications of the internet of things, machine learning, and artificial intelligence; innovative approaches to the problems of identification and authentication on the internet; addressing the ‘talent pipeline problem’ for cybersecurity; and new approaches to the regulatory landscape of cybersecurity.
“At a time when cybersecurity issues are becoming yet more prominent, profound, and potentially foundational to the stability of societies and economies, it’s a privilege for CLTC to support a range of relevant basic and applied research projects on the Berkeley campus,” said Steven Weber, Faculty Director for CLTC. “The Berkeley research community is creative and courageous as well as disciplined, and that is precisely what the cybersecurity world needs right now.”
This broad, future-oriented scoping of the cybersecurity challenge has allowed the CLTC to support a wide range of research projects. For example, one team will use virtual reality devices, together with wearable biometric devices and eye-tracking technologies, to test a form of personality assessment that can be used to screen candidates in law enforcement and other fields. Another group, led by researchers from UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, will identify what protocols can put in place to protect the security of activists, legal practitioners, and human rights abuse victims as their cases are being investigated.
The 27 winning proposals were chosen through review by a cross-disciplinary committee made up of UC Berkeley faculty members and administrators. Two types of grants were given: seed grants, generally below $15,000, are intended to fund an exploratory study, while discrete project grants of up to $100,000 were given to projects that have defined boundaries with clear outcomes and impact potential. All principal investigators (PIs) have a UC Berkeley research affiliation, and are enrolled in (or have completed) a graduate degree.
For more information—including a list of the research grantees and summaries of their initiatives—please click here.
