LOUISIANA RESEARCH


	Dr. Peter Chen Secure connections By Rob Anderson Making computers smarter and citizens safer Like many in South Louisiana, Louisiana State University computer science professor Peter Chen felt a sense of frustration and fear during the long hunt for a local serial killer that ended in 2003. And, like many Americans, he has known the frustration that comes with running the gauntlet of airport security in this age of terror alerts. Now, with the help of substantial funding from the National Science Foundation, Chen and others in LSU's Department of Computer Science are developing technologies and methods that could help local and national law enforcement capture criminals, track terrorists and protect citizens, making often painstaking processes faster, more efficient and more reliable. Linking law enforcement Chen's small office is overflowing with books and materials, and a marker board behind his desk is filled with complex mathematical symbols and equations. When he's not lecturing on the road or in the classroom, this is where Chen works on "cybersecurity" methods and "smart linkage"-research which recently won him a grant of $1.8 million from the NSF. Smart linkage is simply a method of "discovering hidden data relationships" and building links based on known or just-discovered relationships between data sets. In law enforcement applications, for instance, using software and hardware to link existing databases from agencies across the country will allow information on potential suspects to be obtained quickly and easily. A key concern is linking driver's license databases and applying swipe technology to driver's licenses, so that valid information and photos of individuals could be accessed by airlines and law enforcement officials. As Chen points out, most driver's licenses already have a "swipe" stripe on the back, and license photos and data are already stored electronically by various state agencies. The primary problem remaining, he says, is to find the most effective and efficient way of connecting, or linking, these databases. The smart linkage technology is only one aspect of Chen's research. A complex mathematical model he is working on will help law enforcement and security officials cut down on the labor involved in narrowing lists of suspicious individuals. For instance, he explains, using linked databases, the government or police may come up with thousands of suspicious or "problem" individuals. Then, using a computer program based on the mathematical model, the data on the individuals can be crunched using various factors-location, travel patterns, criminal record and so forth-to narrow the list to a size more manageable for investigators. The program is based on a recently developed algorithm for a type of database that Chen created in the 1970s, called the Entity-Relationship Model. "Right now, if you go to an airport, everyone is searched indiscriminately. If every passenger is forced to waste one hour, that is huge in terms of time and salary," says Chen. "We could use our resources more efficiently by focusing on the ones who are most likely to be terrorists. Our new algorithm, combined with the Entity-Relationship model, prioritizes the searches based on different risks from different people."