Looking Through The Web of Pages to the Internet of Things

Discussions of the Internet of Things often focus on the vast number of devices, sensors, and data that will result from a ubiquitous computing environment. Whereas current users of the Web will focus on networked devices that serve web pages and digitized content; users of the Internet of Things will need to be able to define, deploy, analyze, and visualize information sharing and analysis processes. In this talk, we briefly sketch a language, based on a process graphs (a generalization of a Unix ‘pipe’) to describe information sharing and analysis pipelines. These processes operate upon a wide variety of heterogeneous data that includes text such as legal documents and configuration files as well as graphical data such as cyber-physical systems and social relations. We demonstrate our approach on a catalog of analysis techniques on critical infrastructure systems and specifically focus on a structural complexity metric algorithm. We describe how we can deploy the complexity metric algorithm, encoded using this process calculus, to a testbed network. The complexity metric is used to not only measure the structural complexity of different critical infrastructure network architectures (using our 8-substation CPTL model), but also the design and deployment of the algorithm itself. In this manner, we demonstrate the ability to create and analyze the complexity of an information sharing and analysis network.

About the Speaker

Gabriel Weaver

Gabriel Weaver is a Research Scientist at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During his research career, Weaver has served at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and as a non-residential fellow at Harvard where he designed an XML vocabulary to encode Ancient Greek Mathematical Diagrams. Most recently Weaver was named the Inaugural Dieckamp Postdoctoral Fellow to explore new theoretical approaches to evaluate cyber-physical systems’ security within the context of critical infrastructure. Research efforts to develop a Cyber-Physical Topology Language (CPTL) are coordinated with the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) and other national laboratories including Idaho National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Weaver holds a Ph.D. from Dartmouth College, and a B.A. in Classics in Mathematics, with a minor in Computer Science from the College of the Holy Cross. He has been a long-time collaborator and contributor to concepts and code surrounding Canonical Text Services developed out of the Multitext of Homer Project at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. For his dissertation at Dartmouth College, Weaver applied similar ideas to create eXtended Unix Tools (XUTools) to process a broader class of languages (in the language- theoretic sense) in which security policies are expressed. Throughout history, people have identified meaningful substrings of text and categorized them into groups for analysis such as sentences, pages, lines, function blocks, and books. Weaver’s dissertation formalizes these structures via context-free languages by which practitioners can extract, count, and compare files in terms of high-level language structures. Articles on XUTools have been featured in news outlets such as ComputerWorld, CIO Magazine, Communications of the ACM, and Slashdot.

During his career at UIUC, he has co-advised 5 Ph.D students with Professor William H. Sanders, Department Head of ECE. Two of these students, co-authors with Sanders and Weaver, recently received best paper awards Weaver at highly-competitive conferences in systems security and resilience: QEST 2015 and DSN 2016. PI Weaver has a long history of educational outreach and mentoring including serving as a Lead Instructor for a Dartmouth Security Camp for 10 teenage students, to serving as a Resident Assistant (RA) for a hall of 60 Freshmen in college, to designing and teaching curriculum to roughly 16 incarcerated students with various mental disorders and criminal history.