Lorrie Cranor, associate research professor in computer science and engineering and public policy, and Elisa Bertino of Purdue University have received funding for work in privacy and security policy management through IBM's new Open Collaboration Research (OCR) program.

Carnegie Mellon is one of seven leading U.S. universities to receive support for software projects under the new program, which features an open approach to intellectual property that IBM says will make industry-academia collaborations easier.Under the OCR program, project results developed between IBM Research and university faculty and students will be made available as open source software code and all additional intellectual property developed will be openly published or made available royalty-free.

"The OCR program will allow faculty and students to freely conduct research without concern over IP management issues," said Stuart Feldman, vice president for computer science at IBM Research. "This program will not only help advance the state of the art of software, but also will serve as a great illustration of collaborative innovation with the open source community."

The team of Cranor and Bertino will collaborate with IBM researchers to address problems faced by organizations in creating and managing end-to-end privacy and security policies. Cranor and her students will focus on policy authoring and ways of communicating about policies with end users. They are also building a repository of web site privacy policies and a set of policy analysis tools that they plan to make available to other researchers. Francois Margot, associate professor of operations research at the Tepper School of Business, also received funding under the OCR program. He will work with the University of California at Davis to advance the scope and size of industrial problems that can be solved with mathematical optimatization software.

Other universities in the OCR program are Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rutgers University and the University of California at Berkeley.