Worcester Polytechnic Institute

About: Worcester Polytechnic Institute is a education organization based out in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Data envelopment analysis. The organization has 6270 authors who have published 12704 publications receiving 332081 citations. The organization is also known as: WPI.

Information quality benchmarks: product and service performance

Abstract: Information quality (IQ) is an inexact science in terms of assessment and benchmarks. Although various aspects of quality and information have been investigated [1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12], there is still a critical need for a methodology that assesses how well organizations develop information products and deliver information services to consumers. Benchmarks developed from such a methodology can help compare information quality across organizations, and provide a baseline for assessing IQ improvements.

Learning analytics and educational data mining: towards communication and collaboration

Abstract: Growing interest in data and analytics in education, teaching, and learning raises the priority for increased, high-quality research into the models, methods, technologies, and impact of analytics. Two research communities -- Educational Data Mining (EDM) and Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) have developed separately to address this need. This paper argues for increased and formal communication and collaboration between these communities in order to share research, methods, and tools for data mining and analysis in the service of developing both LAK and EDM fields.

Ensuring data storage security in Cloud Computing

Abstract: Cloud Computing has been envisioned as the next-generation architecture of IT Enterprise. In contrast to traditional solutions, where the IT services are under proper physical, logical and personnel controls, Cloud Computing moves the application software and databases to the large data centers, where the management of the data and services may not be fully trustworthy. This unique attribute, however, poses many new security challenges which have not been well understood. In this article, we focus on cloud data storage security, which has always been an important aspect of quality of service. To ensure the correctness of users' data in the cloud, we propose an effective and flexible distributed scheme with two salient features, opposing to its predecessors. By utilizing the homomorphic token with distributed verification of erasure-coded data, our scheme achieves the integration of storage correctness insurance and data error localization, i.e., the identification of misbehaving server(s). Unlike most prior works, the new scheme further supports secure and efficient dynamic operations on data blocks, including: data update, delete and append. Extensive security and performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is highly efficient and resilient against Byzantine failure, malicious data modification attack, and even server colluding attacks.

Enabling public verifiability and data dynamics for storage security in cloud computing

Abstract: Cloud Computing has been envisioned as the next-generation architecture of IT Enterprise. It moves the application software and databases to the centralized large data centers, where the management of the data and services may not be fully trustworthy. This unique paradigm brings about many new security challenges, which have not been well understood. This work studies the problem of ensuring the integrity of data storage in Cloud Computing. In particular, we consider the task of allowing a third party auditor (TPA), on behalf of the cloud client, to verify the integrity of the dynamic data stored in the cloud. The introduction of TPA eliminates the involvement of client through the auditing of whether his data stored in the cloud is indeed intact, which can be important in achieving economies of scale for Cloud Computing. The support for data dynamics via the most general forms of data operation, such as block modification, insertion and deletion, is also a significant step toward practicality, since services in Cloud Computing are not limited to archive or backup data only. While prior works on ensuring remote data integrity often lacks the support of either public verifiability or dynamic data operations, this paper achieves both. We first identify the difficulties and potential security problems of direct extensions with fully dynamic data updates from prior works and then show how to construct an elegant verification scheme for seamless integration of these two salient features in our protocol design. In particular, to achieve efficient data dynamics, we improve the Proof of Retrievability model [1] by manipulating the classic Merkle Hash Tree (MHT) construction for block tag authentication. Extensive security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme is highly efficient and provably secure.