Many people and institutions are considering how to make students who aren't taking computer security classes aware of the issues and make them think about how to improve the state of software and systems. Here four exercises are presented: one from a class introducing non-majors to computers and programming, and three from a beginning programming class for majors. The focus is on introductory classes because they form the basis for students' computing experiences. Introducing concepts of in formation assurance and computer security early makes the students more aware of these issues.

Data about mobility provides information to improve city planning, identify traffic patterns, detect traffic jams, and route vehicles around them. This data often contains proprietary and personal information that companies and individuals do not wish others to know, for competitive and personal reasons. This sets up a paradox: the data needs to be analyzed, but it cannot be without revealing information that must be kept secret. A solution is to sanitize the data—i.e., remove or suppress the sensitive information. The goal of sanitization is to protect sensitive information while enabling analyses of the data that will produce the same results as analyses of the unsanitized data. However, protecting information requires that sanitized data cannot be linked to data from other sources in a manner that leads to desanitization. This project reviews typical strategies used to sanitize datasets, the research on how some of these strategies are unsuccessful, and the questions that must be addressed to better understand the risks of desanitization.

The present study explored listeners’ expectations about how prosodic prominence can be used to disambiguate information structure in English. In particular, the contribution of prenuclear accents to the prosodic disambiguation of the size of the focus constituent (broad VP vs. narrow object focus) in SVO constructions was tested using the cross-modal priming paradigm. In two experiments, listeners were presented with visual targets (e.g., “brunette”) following contrastively related primes (e.g., “blonde”), which were heard as objects in SVO sentences (e.g., “He kissed a blonde.”). In Experiment 1, listeners heard the sentences produced with a single pitch accent on the object, and the focus structure varied from broad VP focus to narrow object focus. No significant differences in priming patterns across conditions were found, supporting theories of Focus Projection (e.g., Selkirk 1995, Gussenhoven 1984), which predict prenuclear accents to be optional. In Experiment 2, the information structure of the sentences was held constant as narrow object focus, and their prosody varied with respect to the presence of a prenuclear pitch accent on the verb. For these narrow focus sentences, it was found that priming occurred only when the sentence lacked a prenuclear accent, suggesting that prenuclear pitch accents contribute meaningfully to the information structural contrast. Sensitivity to the prosodic manipulation, however, was found to be modulated by individual differences in listeners’ “autistic” traits. The implications for on-line lexical processing and theories of themapping between prosody and information structureare discussed.