Revolution through Competition?

From Brunelleschi's 1419 design for the dome of the Florence cathedral to the Ansari X-prize for space flight, competitions and prizes have long been used to stimulate scientific and technological advances. In computer science today, we see programming competitions and competitions to attack and defend system configurations. Can we construct a competition that will bring the energy, talent, and experience of students, academics, industry and government experts to bear on the problem of designing large scale systems with dependable security? This talk will review the history and structure of some scientific and technological competitions and suggest the form that such a new competition might take. Bio: Carl Landwehr has recently returned to the National Science Foundation to direct the Trustworthy Computing Program, a major source of support for basic research in systems to provide usable security and privacy. He is on assignment from his position as Senior Research Scientist at the University of Maryland's Institute for Systems Research. During his recently completed term as a Program Manager at IARPA, he developed programs to advance technologies in the areas of private information retrieval and software vulnerability reduction. Earlier programs focused on accountable information flow and large scale system defense. At the 2009 ACM CCS conference, ACM SIGSAC honored him with its Outstanding Achievement Award. Dr. Landwehr serves as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine. For many years he led a research group in computer security at the Naval Research Laboratory. Since then he has served as a Senior Fellow at Mitretek Systems (now Noblis) and as the first Program Director for the National Science Foundation's programs in Trusted Computing and Cyber Trust, for which he received the NSF Director's Award for Program Management Excellence. He has been active internationally as the founding chair of IFIP WG 11.3 (Database and Application Security) and is also a member of IFIP WG 10.4 (Dependability and Fault Tolerance). Dr. Landwehr has received Best Paper awards from the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the Computer Security Applications Conference. IFIP has awarded him its Silver Core, and the IEEE Computer Society has awarded him its Golden Core. Dr. Landwehr holds a B.S. degree in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan in Computer and Communication Sciences. Refreshments will be served!