Current Projects
GovLab: Open governance is the governing philosophy that gives citizens the right to access documents and proceedings of the government, to engage in an open discussion with legislators and hold them accountable. In this project, we are exploring the use of Web technologies to build a platform for open governance.
Big Data & Privacy: This project is developing privacy middleware for platforms that process and analyze large-scale data such as Apache Spark.
Accessibility of Mobile Apps: In this project, we are interested in promoting and facilitating the development of accessible mobile applications to open up the world of mobile computing to more users with disabilities.
Solid: We are working on a decentralization platform for Web applications. Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols.
Privacy Preserving Federated Search and Sharing (PPFS2): This is a DHS funded project that is developing distributed middleware to combine advanced cryptography with sophisticated policy reasoning in order to provide privacy-preserving search and sharing of records that include Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This is collaborative work with BBN.
Punya: In this project we are investigating Mobile Humanitarian Technologies as a way to help co-ordinate information and relief efforts during disaster management. We are developing a mobile platform for Linked Data with specific functionality to support emergency relief operations such as quick setup of data collection forms, handling of streaming data, and easy map support to co-ordinate efforts.
Policy Compliant Integration of Linked Data: This multi-university collaborative NSF-funded project seeks to address the immediate concern of how to fuse, integrate and analyze data while respecting privacy, security and usage concerns.
Accountable Information Usage: This project is funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and is aimed developing systems in which the flow of information can be tracked, where all participants are provided machine-understandable policies about information sharing and use, and where automated processes can check that the sharing and use of information complies with institutional policies.
Tabulator: This is a generic Semantic Web data browser, which provides a way to browse RDF data.
Past Projects
The NSF funded project on the Theory and Practice of Accountable Systems (TPAS) investigates computational and social properties of information networks necessary to provide reliable assessments of compliance with rules and policies governing the use of information.
The Army Knowledge Online project funded by DARPA is aimed at enabling the creation, linking and querying of data resources at the scale needed by AKO. This will include tasks such as (i) adding read/write capabilities for both data and policies in the Tabulator, (ii) allowing linked data to be queried in the Tabulator, (iii) using the Tabulator to create linked data from structured data in CSV or other such formats and to embed metadata in non-data assets, and (iv) working with RPI to identify possible opportunities for Semantic Web technologies at AKO as well as identify hard problems to be solved in developing and deploying "Web 3.0" capabilities for AKO.
The AFOSR funded project titled Secure SW Federation is focussed on developing protocols and technologies to support secure federation systems for the Semantic Web that will enable large-scale dynamic aggregation across heterogeneous secure sources that use different policy languages to authorize access.
The use of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) techniques enable a client to retrieve items from a co-operating database without revealing either the query or the items being retrieved. In order to prevent clients from accessing information they are not authorized to access, it must be possible to prove that the queries being posed are compliant with a set of privacy policies previously agreed upon by the client and server. This IARPA funded project on Policy Assurance for PIR Queries deals with proving that queries made by the client conform to mandated policies and that leakage of sensitive information is not possible.
The Fusion Center project supports information sharing at Fusion Centers using accountability techniques developed in our lab and is funded by DHS. This information sharing requires the ability to represent and evaluate the interaction of policies over information from multiple sources, governed by laws from different jurisdictions, with the real possibility that applicable laws might either conflict or lead to inconclusive results.
Semantic Web Application Platform for the Mobile Ecosystem (SwapMe), funded by Nokia Research Center, is a joint project of MIT CSAIL and Nokia Research Center Cambridge. The goals of SwapMe are to build systems that offer users flexible, content-, and policy-aware means to access and manipulate information and environments.
The Transparent Accountable Datamining Initiative (TAMI) Project, funded by NSF, is creating technical, legal, and policy foundations for transparency and accountability in large-scale aggregation and inferencing across heterogeneous information systems.
Semantic Web Advanced Development, funded by DARPA under the DAML program, creating and distributing core components that form the basis for the Semantic Web.
Policy Aware Web, funded by NSF, a collaboration between MINDSWAP and DIG to work toward creating discretionary, rules-based access for the World Wide Web.