Biography of Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham is the Program Director in Data and Applications Security at the National Science Foundation and is a member of NSF’s team on Cyber Trust and also participates in NSF’s inter-agency efforts on homeland security and is a member of DHHS’s team on States Bioterrorism Initiative. She has been with the MITRE Corporation since January 1989 and is on IPA to NSF since October 2001. At MITRE she was  a department head managing a group of about 30 staff in information and data management in the Information Technology Division and was later the chief scientist in data management in the Information Technology Directorate and has supported a number of sponsors including the Air Force, Navy, Army, CIA, NSA and IRS involving secure databases, real-time data management for the AWACS program and data mining for Massive Digital Data Systems.  Priori to joining MITRE she worked in the commercial industry for over 5 years, first on product development at Control Data Corporation’s CDCNET and later at Honeywell Inc. where she conducted research and technology transfer in secure databases, distributed database management, distributed networks and intelligent control systems.

Dr Thuraisingham has worked in secure databases for over eighteen years and is the recipient of IEEE Computer Society’s prestigious 1997 Technical Achievement Award for “outstanding and innovative contributions to secure distributed data management” and recently IEEE’s 2003 Fellow Award for “pioneering contributions to secure systems involving database systems, distributed systems and the web”. Her main research contributions in the field include the design and development of secure relational database systems, design and development of constraint processors for the inference problem, design and development of secure distributed database systems and the design and development of secure object-based multimedia systems. She has published over 250 refereed conference papers, over 60 journal articles, over 40 keynote addresses, over 50 panel papers and over  25 book chapters and magazine articles and numerous other technical reports and invited presentations in secure data management and information technology. She is the inventor of three patents for MITRE on Database Inference Control and  has written 6 books on data management and data mining for technical managers and her recent book is on Web Data Management Technologies and Their Applications to Business Intelligence and Counter-terrorism based on her keynote presentations on the subject at the White House and at the United Nations in 2002. She is currently conducting research in privacy constraint processing, secure sensor information management and secure XML and semantic web and is writing a research textbook on Database and Applications Security based on her eighteen years of experience in the field. She holds a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science from the United Kingdom and had applied her research in recursion theory to prove that the Inference problem is unsolvable and is now working on some theoretical aspects of the privacy problem.

Dr. Thuraisingham serves (or has served) on a number of editorial boards of journals including the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering ands the Journal of Computer Security, serves on the advisory board of IASTED in data management and information security, has chaired several conferences, has edited over 15 books and journal special issues, served on various National Academy of Sciences panels including one on Protecting children from inappropriate content on the Internet, and has served as adjunct professor of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota and at Boston University. She is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the ACM, the British Computer Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Date: September 25 (Thursday), 2003

Dr. Michael J. Ackerman
Assistant Director for High Performance Computing & Communications
National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health
Title: Next Generation Networking: Distributed Multimedia for Healthcare

Biography of Dr. Michael J. Ackerman

Michael J. Ackerman received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in Biomedical Engineering. After graduation he served as a research physiologist in the Hyperbaric Medicine and Physiology Department, Naval Medical Research Institute, where he studied the effects of the hyperbaric environment on neurophysiology and behavior. He later became head of the Institute’s Biomedical Engineering and Computing Branch responsible for the application of computers to real time medical data analysis and the control and monitoring of diving systems. Dr. Ackerman came to the National Library of Medicine in 1987. He served as the Chief of the Educational Technology Branch of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, applying interactive technology to medical education, and as the Associate Director for Specialized Information Services responsible for the Library’s non-bibliographic data bases. He is currently NLM’s Assistant Director for High Performance Computing and Communications, providing guidance for NLM’s telemedicine, distance collaboratory, advanced networking and imaging interests. He holds academic appointments as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Medicine at George Washington University and as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Informatics at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and has published over 140 papers and book chapters.

Dr. Ackerman is active in the field of medical informatics. He was a charter member and served as Treasurer of the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics (AAMSI). He had been a member of the Board of Directors of the Symposium for Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC) from 1976 to 1988 and served as its President. He was the Program Chair for the 9th SCAMC and Finance Chair for Medinfo’86. He is a founding member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and served as Treasurer, Secretary, chair of the Meetings Committee, and as a member of the Board of Directors. He was co-chair of the 1992 Health Science Communications Association (HeSCA) Annual Meeting, a consultant to the Radiological Society of North America’s Electronic Communications Committee, a member of the American Physical Therapy Association’s Advisory Panel on the Resource Center for Research and the United States Pharmacopeial Convention’s Advisory Panel on Consumer Interest and Health Education. He was elected a Founding Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 1992 and a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in 1985. He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the Telemedicine Journal & e-Health, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, and Medicine on the Net and as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) and of AIMBE.

Dr. Ackerman’s work has been recognized through numerous awards including the 1998 Johns Hopkins University Ranice W. Crosby Distinguished Achievement Award, 1997 Government Technology Leadership Award, 1996 National Institutes of Health Director’s Award, the 1996 Friends of the National Library of Medicine Public Service Award, the 1996 Satava Award for Medical Applications of Virtual Reality, the 1995 Public Health Service Special Recognition Award, the 1994 American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Dedicated Service Award, the 1993 American Medical Informatics Association President’s Award, the 1993 Health Sciences Communications Association Special Achievement Award, and the 1992 National Institutes of Health Award of Merit. His work on the Visible Human Project was nominated as a finalist for a 1995 Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation in Software and a 1996 Smithsonian Award for Information Technology.

Date: September 26 (Friday), 2003

Dr. Arif Ghafoor
Professor
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Purdue University
Title: Distributed Multimedia Information Systems: An End-to-End Perspective