Jared Saia Awarded NSF Career Award

February 19, 2006

Professor Jared Saia received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his research on "Foundations for Attack-Resistant Collaborative Peer-to-Peer Systems."  This research aims to create algorithms to enable a group of hundreds of millions of people — a group the size of the entire population of the U.S. — to accomplish a collaborative task even if up to a one-third fraction of the group members are completely untrustworthy. This research uses powerful new mathematical techniques such as extractor and expander graphs and the probabilistic method. It has the somewhat surprising property that it can guarantee security without the need for private communication, and can guarantee correctness without the need for a trusted third party. Applications of this research include: collaborative spam detection, collaborative worm and virus detection, data warehousing, running auctions, collaborative filtering, web search, mechanism enforcement, and running elections.