Shortly after the tragic events of 9/11, many Computer Information Science and Engineering (CISE) researchers began to develop interdisciplinary security-related research resulting in the community of Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) researchers. This interdisciplinary research field integrates advanced information technologies, computer science, computational social science, public policy, social/behavioral studies, and algorithms for security applications. Today, the international ISI community consists of 1,500+ scholars (70% in CISE disciplines; 30% in political and social sciences, international relations, criminal justice, etc.). Numerous law enforcement, intelligence experts, and IT practitioners actively participate in this community. The ISI community supports counterterrorism and homeland security?s missions of anticipation, prevention, preparedness, and response to security events, in physical, cyber, enterprise, and societal spaces by conducting high-impact research on emerging topics such as ?cybersecurity analytics? and ?terrorism informatics? using Big Data to predict, understand, and prevent events such as data breaches and terrorist attacks.

The broad scope, diversity of research topics, and longevity of ISI have resulted in the collection of hundreds of security related datasets. Unlike traditional CISE researchers who have access to publicly available data, however, the ISI community had no central data storage. In a domain where adversaries advance their skills at a staggering rate, this limitation severely hinders the development of transformative ISI research and ultimately, the security of modern society. This project aimed to address this critical gap by developing an ISI community infrastructure consisting of an opensource data repository and computational tools for data collection and analytics.

Each year of the project saw a steady rise in the number of published papers citing the available datasets, demonstrating broad dissemination of the resource. To our knowledge, from 2016-2019, a total of 47 papers have been published that cite data from the DIBBs portal. Users from over 100 different countries (as identified by IP) have downloaded just under 7 terabytes of data throughout the course of the project, through 94,000 file requests. Numerous U.S. and international academic institutions have downloaded data, and notable companies accessing the data include Amazon, Capital One, Cisco, Facebook, IBM, Paypal, and Yahoo.

The broader impacts of the project are exemplified by the numerous training and professional development opportunities for students involved in the project including hands-on infrastructure development, data collection and management, tool building, and engagement in a variety of community development events. Over thirty graduate students throughout our partner institutions were involved in this project in some capacity, many of whom contributed to or authored papers that used portal data.

An additional way that this project has made significant impacts is through the incorporation of datasets and tools from the portal into course curricula and other educational materials. Exposing students to real-world datasets gives them hands-on experience in ISI related research and prepares them for a career in the ISI domain. Over the past two years, the University of Arizona, the University of Georgia, and the University of South Florida have all developed new cybersecurity curricula using datasets provided by the portal.

Last Modified: 12/09/2019
Modified by: Hsinchun Chen