[Asis-l] Talk: Charlie Clarke on Desktop Search, UW, Monday Mar 6, 3:30 - 4:30pm

[Edwin Corprew M Reed]

You are cordially invited:

WHEN:      Monday March 6, 3:30-4:30pm.
WHERE:     Mary Gates Hall Room 420  (UW Campus, Seattle WA)
            http://www.washington.edu/home/maps/northcentral.html?MGH
HOST:      Efthimis Efthimiadis
SPONSORS:  The Information School and the ASIS&T UW Student Chapter

TITLE:     Security for Desktop Search in Multi-User Environments
SPEAKER:   Charlie Clarke  [mailto:claclark at plg.uwaterloo.ca]
            University of Waterloo

ABSTRACT:

Many desktop search systems maintain per-user indices to keep track of
file contents. In a multi-user environment this is not a viable
solution, since a file may have to be indexed many times, once for every
user that may access the file, causing both space and performance
problems. On the other hand, having a single system-wide index for all
users allows for efficient indexing but may require special security
mechanisms to guarantee that the search results do not violate any file
permissions.

The talk will present a security model for full-text file system search,
based on the UNIX security model, and discuss two implementations of the
model.  The first implementation, based on a postprocessing approach,
allows an arbitrary user to obtain information about the content of
files for which he or she does not have read permission. The second
implementation does not share this problem.  An experimental performance
evaluation for both implementations will also be presented.

BIO:

Charlie Clarke is an Associate Professor in the Cheriton School of
Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada.  Currently, he
is on sabbatical as a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft.  His research
interests cover many areas of information retrieval, including
evaluation, performance, question answering, XML retrieval and user
interaction.

Charlie received his Ph.D. from Waterloo in 1996.  From 1996 to 1999 he
was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering at the University of Toronto.  He has previously held
software development positions at a number of computer consulting and
engineering firms.

Thanks,

--Corprew Reed
ASIS&T UW Student Chapter President
--
Corprew Reed / corprew at u.washington.edu / http://www.corprew.org

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and
don't assign them tasks and work.  Instead, teach them to yearn for the
vast and endless sea.  -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery