My current project interests are in the broad area of authoring and reasoning about access-control policies and their interactions with programs. Access-control policies are rigorous statements about who can do what on a system. For example, homework submission systems allow you to submit assignments for courses you're enrolled in but don't allow you to view assignments turned in by other students. These policies are used in all sorts of applications, from digital libraries to electronic health records. I'll advise a variety of project ideas (both MQP and IQP) in this space, including

• theoretical questions about how to capture policies and prove that they satisfy certain requirements
• human-factors questions about how people interpret policies and what sort of policy authoring tools could help people capture policies more accurately
• implementation work on our policy analysis tools

Our project and tool page has more details and links to papers.

If you're interested in a project in this general space, drop me mail about your interests and we can try to focus on a topic. I'm on sabbatical this year and not on campus, but I am quite accessible on email. Most of my work on these topics is joint with Prof Dougherty, so you could talk to him as well.

Current and Past Projects

• Generating Header Files (2005-6; Sponsored by EMC Corporation). Tyler Benoit, Sean Donovan, and Brandon Kilgore.
• Emergency Situation Simulation (2005-6; co-advised with Elise Weaver). Tim Gagnon and Mike Kissinger.
• Translating Timing Diagrams into Buchi Automata (2002-2003; co-advised with Dan Dougherty). Warren Schudy and Pete Cooper.
• Feature-Based Software Verification with JPF. (2002-2003) Frank Gerrantana, Jordan Maddock, and Scott Wallace.
• Random Connected Graphs (2001-2002; co-advised with Stanley Selkow). Alex Haley and Dale Vaillancourt
• Expressive Timing Diagram Sequences (2001-2002). Zaheer Kapadia, Mike Klos, and David Ramshaw.
• Data Mining State Machine Simulations (2000-2001; co-advised with Carolina Ruiz). Chris Cole.

Kathi Fisler's home page