Curriculum Vitae - The University of Texas at Dallas

the concepts in semantic nets and conceptual graphs and developed methods for secure applicationsdesign. A paper titled “On the Use of Conceptual Structures for Handling the Inference Problem”published in IFIP Data Security Conference in 1991 is widely quoted and Dr. Thomas Hinke and his teambased their research on my work. At that time, the database security community was divided about theapproach to designing inference controllers. Many felt that it had to be done during database design time.However, I was perhaps one of a handful of researchers who was far-thinking. I believed that a timewould come where we would have the technologies to address the limitations we had in 1990. Therefore, Ifelt that we needed an integrated approach to study the inference problem, during query, update anddatabase design. Some researchers from the University of Texas at that time agreed with me and publishedin the Proceedings of the 1991 Computer Security Applications Conference something to the effect that“Thuraisingham’s approach was correct”. Now, almost 20 years later, it is my approach that the semanticweb community is pursuing–including Dr. Tim Finin and his team at the University of Maryland,Baltimore County and Sir Tim Berners Lee and his team at MIT. We are also developing inferencecontrollers during query processing with semantic web technologies since 2005. My research on theinference problem has resulted in three US Patents. These patents are widely cited in numerous otherpatents, and have been purchased by Intellectual Ventures from MITRE for a substantial sum of money (Iwas told that my patents were three of the four “must have” patents Intellectual Ventures wanted).As stated earlier, the third area I focused back in late 1980s was on secure objects. After working on thefirst secure object system with the team at the University of Minnesota, I felt that we had to look atexisting object models and examine security issues. My paper on SORION (which incorporated securityinto ORION) was published in the highly prestigious conference ACM OOPSLA. This paper is titled“Mandatory Security in Object Database System” and is widely cited. Prof. Elisa Bertino from Purdue hasstated that this paper is a “must read” for anyone wanting to work in object security. This was followed bythe design and implementation of a system using ObjectStore data manager and we presented the results toOntos Corporation which was developing the first commercial secure object database system with fundingfrom the Air Force.Around 1992, while continuing to work in secure databases, I then started to get into a new area and that isreal-time data management. This was because the Air Force had a critical need to modernize the oldsystems such as AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System). Because of my strong expertise in datamanagement, I was invited to join the team. The contributions we made here are long-lasting. Wepublished papers in the main conferences and workshops in object real-time systems and they are widelycited. While working with the team to design and develop a main memory data manager based on objectsand adapt the priority ceiling concurrency control protocol for the data manager, I was the first tointroduce real-time features for Object Request Brokers. I first presented this work at the Navy’s NextGeneration Standards meeting in Newport, Rhode Island in June 1994. Then, with the team, we wrote aposition paper and presented it at OOPSLA 1994 workshop. I then used some of my ideas into buildingthe infrastructure for AWACS. In August 1995, I was invited to participate in a panel at Object World inSan Francisco. At the end of my talk I said, “It’s time for OMG (Object Management Group) to start aspecial interest group on this topic”. I was contacted by some people who attended OMG, and I gave sometechnical presentations to them and helped co-found the group. This was a huge breakthrough as thosewho were going to operationalize the prototypes we had developed would now have standards to workwith for the middleware. During this time I also wanted to combine my work in security and real-time tobuild dependable systems. I presented some ideas at a Navy meeting in December 1992, and got Prof.Sang Son from the University of Virginia interested in this topic and we collaborated on a few papers.Then I combined all my ideas together in a design of a dependable system and this paper was published inIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering in 1999 which spawned a new area of research.During 1995 I was given the role of managing a department in information and data management. Iintroduced data mining to MITRE Corporation in October 1995. My colleague Dr. Chris Clifton (who isnow at Purdue and who was in my department) worked with me and we put together three programs indata, text and image mining. One of the projects was jointly carried out with Prof. Jeff Ullman of StanfordUniversity and Sergey Brin (who is the co-founder of Google). Sergey had planned his thesis to be on atopic called Query Flocks. I engineered this collaboration between MITRE and Stanford which gaveMITRE tremendous visibility among the major players in data mining. The two teams published a paper9