Ongoing Research Projects in the Department of Computer Science
Nearly all NKU Computer Science faculty are involved in research. Here we highlight three of our major research groups.
Data Privacy
Organizations collect vast amounts of information on individuals, and at the same time they have access to ever-increasing levels of computational power. Although this conjunction of information and power provides great benefits to society, it also threatens individual privacy. Balancing the effectiveness of data mining against the need for true anonymity presents many challenges. It is difficult to estimate the risk of disclosure since it is difficult to guess intruder background knowledge. It is also difficult to assess information loss arising from the de-identification of data, since the loss is strongly dependent on user needs. Data anonymization is often driven by policy, but privacy legislation is often unclear. Finally, different data models require different privacy approaches.
Our research team investigates the privacy protection problem based on a specific data model. The two main research directions of the data privacy group at NKU are: Privacy Models and Algorithms for Microdata and Privacy in Social Networks.
Faculty: Dr. Traian Marius Truta, Dr. Alina Campan
Students: John Miller, Roy Ford, Scot Cunningham, Mike Abrinica, Paul Meyer, Nick Cooper, Justin Shelton
Web Site: http://cscdb.nku.edu/dataprivacy/
Software Security
Open source software, like commercial software, varies widely in the number of vulnerabilities present in its code. We develop and study models to predict the presence and number of vulnerabilities of code based on software metrics, such as churn, code size, and cyclomatic complexity. We also study software engineering practices of open source projects that impact security.
Faculty: Dr. James Walden, Dr. Maureen Doyle, Dr. Dhanuja Kasturiratna, Dr. Alina Campan
Students: Michael Whelan, Grant Welch, John Murray, Robert Lenhof
Web Site:
Database Security
This research concentrates on studying new methodologies for identifying information attacks against databases and designing algorithms that can effectively alert the system administrators of anomalous activities of insiders or outsiders, in order to protect critical data of an organization. Our research also studies new methodologies for fast database damage assessment after identification of a malicious transaction in a post-information-warfare scenario.
Faculty: Dr. Yi Hu,Dr. Alina Campan,Dr. James Walden
Students: Irina Vorobyeva, Justin Shelton, Wade Felt
Web Site: http://www.nku.edu/~huy1
