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AAAS-2004
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Science and Security
Issues of Trust and Security in Biological Databases
Saturday, February 14
11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
PARTICIPANT:
Maria Zemankova, National Science Foundation
Security, Privacy, Trust and Bioinformatics
Extended Abstract:
In this presentation, the term “bioinformatics” includes the data, information and knowledge and
their acquisition, search, analysis, discovery and dissemination in broad areas spanning
proteomics, genetics, neurology, medicine, zoology, botany, … to populations, and ecosystems.
The goal of bioinformatics efforts is to provide an effective information-rich environment that will
support endeavors in understanding of life from the molecular to the global scale, and use this
understanding in improving the quality of human life as well as the global health.
The area of bioinformatics has enjoyed a fast growth in the past decade and has a great success
story to point to, namely the Human Genome project that advanced rapidly due to an excellent
underlying information infrastructure. Information-driven research is advancing rapidly other welldefined areas. However, the challenge now is to link complex inter-dependencies among the
elements of specific biological and environmental systems and discover new interactions. We
need to harness all kinds of information, ranging from proteomics to ecosystems, as well as
information about environments that range from frozen polar regions and volcanic vents to
temperate forests and agricultural lands as well as the neighborhoods and industries of urban
centers. The key issue underlying such endeavors is complexity, i.e., research on the individual
components of biological or environmental systems provides only limited information about their
behavior, and cannot provide answers needed for understanding the global system and hence
improving of the global health. Therefore, the challenge is to provide bioinformatics tools that will
enable interdisciplinary, collaborative research.
In order to have comprehensive understanding, e.g., relating to the West Nile Virus, we also need
to consider other related sources of information, e.g., on global warming, travel patterns, etc. It
would be desirable to have an integrated access to all relevant sources of information and have
tools for information integration and manipulation across the various domains. However, we
cannot achieve this goal without solving difficult issues in conceptual integration of
heterogeneous data, information, ontologies and various knowledge type representations,
knowledge evolution; addressing technical problems in seamless access to various to storage
and networking paradigms; as well as information needs of the various users, including the
guarantees for security, privacy and trust in the information we “own” or access.
Efforts on various aspects of this overarching goal will be discussed, with a special emphasis on
the tradeoffs between security, privacy and trust. Most people would agree that medical patient
records must be protected, but on the other hand anybody would prefer to have their medical
record’s privacy compromised in an emergency situation, should this save their life. Although
such considerations may not apply to animals or plants, some biodiversity data is sensitive, as
the locations observations on endangered species should not come into wrong hands. To be
sure that this does not happen, we can consider an option of not providing access to the data
over public networks, or removing accurate location and other attributes from the data. The
questions we need to ask is when and how to implement the various security/privacy/trust
strategies.
Issues addressed will include: key security/privacy/trust issues in biological databases, including
their relative importance, suggestions for addressing them, and implications of not addressing
them.
Research issues and research support opportunities at the National Science Foundation and
other agencies will be discussed, with an aim to also receive feedback on new research
directions in bioinformatics.
Maria Zemankova
Biosketch
Maria Zemankova
Program Director
Information & Data Management (IDM)
Information & Intelligent Systems Division (IIS)
Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate (CISE)
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 1115
Arlington, Virginia 22230, USA
Phone: (703)292-8930
Fax:(703) 292-9073
Email: [email protected]
Maria Zemankova spent her youth in the Czech Republic, learnt English working as an Au-Pair in
England, received her B.S. in Mathematics and Computing with minor in Psychology from the
American University in Cairo in 1977, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Florida
State University in 1979 and 1983, respectively.
From 1984 to 1988 she was on faculty of the Department of Computer Science at the University
of Tennessee, Knoxville. She served as the director for the Database and Expert Systems
Program at the National Science Foundation during 1989-93. She was instrumental in the
conception of initiatives "Research on Scientific Databases" and "Digital Libraries". She spent a
year with the MITRE Corporation in McLean, Virginia as a Principal Scientist in the area of
information systems, and returned to NSF in Fall 1994. She served as the Deputy Division
Director for the Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems Fall 1995 - Fall 1997. Maria spent
the year 2002 as a Visiting Researcher at the National Library of Medicine in the Cognitive
Science Branch at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, working in the
area of medical informatics.
Her research interests are in intelligent information systems, knowledge discovery in scientific
and medical databases, information organization and tailored information access/delivery in
digital libraries, evolutionary information systems, organization and process modeling in
information systems, and management of uncertainty, reasoning and learning in knowledgebased systems.
Her publications include a monograph Fuzzy Relational Databases - a Key to Expert Systems coauthored with A. Kandel (Verlag TUV Rheinland, Koln, 1984) translated to Japanese by M.
Mukaidono (Keigaku Publishing Co., Tokyo, 1987), five volumes of Methodologies for Intelligent
Systems co-edited with Z. Ras (ACM SIGART Press, 1986; North Holland, 1987, 1990; Springer
Verlag, 1991, 1994), Intelligent Systems: State of the Art and Future Directions, co-edited with Z.
Ras (Artificial Intelligence Series, Ellis Horwood Limited, London, 1990), and papers in journals,
conference proceedings, or invited contributions to books. Maria Zemankova is Co-Editor-in-Chief
with L. Kerschberg and Z. Ras of Journal of Intelligent Information Systems: Integrating Artificial
Intelligence and Database Technologies, an Associate Editor of the Int. J. of Approximate
Reasoning, and has been on program or organizing committees of numerous conferences and
workshops.
Dr. Zemankova is a member of ACM, IEEE, NAFIPS (North American Fuzzy Information
Processing Society), and Sigma Xi. In 1992, she received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions
Award.