How can we create ����������������community food security���������������? This project aims to develop a community-based socially intelligent nonprofit food rescue and distribution infrastructure to fairly serve vulnerable communities experiencing food insecurity. This infrastructure will have a loop mechanism that continuously learns consumer preferences and provides feedback to upstream stages of the supply chain and also learns about the food availability at the local food sources and feeds that information to the downstream stages. The main objective of this research is to minimize food waste along different stages of the supply chain while maximizing equitable access to safe food given consumer preferences. Food banks are nonprofit organizations that provide a framework for the non-profit food supply chain by collecting donations from multiple sources such as local grocers, growers, and the community (e.g., food drives) and distributing the donations to food-insecure households through a network of community-based partner agencies (e.g., food pantries, homeless shelters, schools). The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly strained this network as demand has surged, the volunteer-based workforce has waned, and supply uncertainty has increased highlighting both the network������������������s strengths and limitations and the need to strengthen the community-based infrastructure and create solutions that are self-reliant and robust for communities that are affected by such events.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have raised concerns of ethics in regards to intelligent, adaptive agents. This project begins from a model of a sociotechnical system (STS) comprising autonomous social entities (people and organizations -- principals) and technical entities (agents, who help principals). Its objective is to uncover principles of multiagent systems that enable developing sociotechnical systems that incorporate ethical concerns adaptively and from multiple perspectives, and with high confidence. This project will develop a formal computational representation of an STS in terms of social controls over its principals and technical controls over its agents.

This project will investigate theoretical models and programming techniques for decentralized applications. Emerging technologies show great potential in helping bring about a new era of automated contracts that enables flexible transactions among independent parties---with applications in finance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, among other domains. This project will go beyond current approaches by providing a new declarative model that is able to handle the challenging computing-related aspects of real-life contracts. This model is accompanied with techniques that provide guidance on how to specify and enact contracts in a manner that is precise, flexible, and eliminates unnecessary information sharing.

Frequent security breaches have highlighted both the growing importance of cybersecurity and weaknesses of traditional methods such as firewalls, malware detection, intrusion detection, and prevention technologies. To leap ahead of attackers, we must move beyond passive defense strategies toward a new science of interactive personalized deception for cyberdefense. Our proposed approach involves (1) building models of attackers and their propensities and (2) characterizing computers, networks, users, and their relationships and interactions so as to enable realistic deception. We will develop a modular framework for evaluation of the key deception techniques consisting of a pluggable game-based scaffolding.

The overarching goal of the proposed research is to identify, test, and evaluate technologically enabled and community-supported solutions for temporally distributing travel demand for on-demand public transportation services in an equitable manner, without the use of traditional pricing incentives. We are specifically interested in understanding whether enabling and incentivizing prosocial behavior, such as volunteering to shift one������������������s trip time to accommodate others, share a ride, and cooperate with other users to improve outcomes for the user community or to prioritize a transportation disadvantaged user, is a potential solution that is feasible and desirable for communities. If our preliminary analysis during the proposed planning grant (PG) supports the case of cooperative adaptive ride planning, we will investigate how prosocial behavior can be enabled in a trip scheduling environment and be facilitated through the use of artificial intelligence (AI), and we will test and evaluate the efficacy of this approach in improving service during an integrative research grant (IRG). No previous research has explored empathy and prosocial behavior in the context of traveler choices and decision-making.

This project proposes the continuation of the Science of Security Lablet at NC State University. Science of Security refers to the study of cybersecurity from an explicitly scientific perspective. Cybersecurity encompasses elements of technology, human behavior, and policy. Science of Security seeks to identify and apply the appropriate scientific principles on cybersecurity problems, enhancing rigor and reproducibility, thereby improving the transfer of research to practice. This Lablet provides a home for investigations into diverse topics pertaining to a Science of Security. The Lablet will support the three major elements of a Science of Security: research, scientific methods, and community engagement.

This project investigates a form of active cyberdefense based on defensive deception against an attacker. It applies a form of game theory called hypergame theory that enables a natural representation of situations where an attacker and a defender can be understood as playing a different game. This project will develop computational models of hypergames that reflect cyber attack and defense strategies to support the investigation of tradeoffs such as between defense effectiveness and cost. If successful, the project will yield representations and algorithms that defenders could apply to disrupt an attacker's beliefs and thus cause attacks to fail.

IT/OT convergence is here. However, along with producing great improvements in automation and agility, it vastly increases the threat surface of manufacturing. Whereas previously OT networks were isolated from the outside, now they can be readily accessed and attacked through the IT network. Traditional security emphasizes perimeter defenses, which seek to prevent an attacker from penetrating a network. However, as manufacturing and other industries have commonly experienced, attackers often do breach perimeter defenses through a combination of technical and human factors. An insider threat is an attacker on the inside, e.g., via stolen user credentials or a compromised equipment vendor. How can we detect and respond to insider threats? The detection must cause minimal disruption to operations. It is not feasible to "shut down and reinstall everything" in manufacturing. Therefore, this project will investigate defensive deception in manufacturing as means to achieve resilience in the face of insider threats.

LAS DO1 Singh - 2.1 Human- Machine Collaboration - Workflows

: How can we help organizations share access to their data with their business partners and users effectively (providing precise controls including the ability to terminate access as needed) and efficiently (with low administrative overhead)? Specifically, how can organizations negotiate and ����������������prosecute��������������� (i.e., enact, monitor, enforce) business contracts in real-time to support real-time analytics? This project investigates an approach based on the combination of a logic-based approach based on legal norms with blockchain architecture for a shared ledger. RQ1. How can we express sharing policies formally, including policies referencing other policies? RQ2. How can we represent the requisite information in an information architecture that combines an immutable ledger with mutable information stores? RQ3. How can we reason with sharing policies in our information architecture, using smart contracts on the blockchain to verify compliance and guide the reasoning of the off-blockchain agents?