The Internet has become critical to the world’s marketplace.
On-line retailers have given us an entirely new way to find out about products
and to buy them. Many people bank and pay taxes through the Internet. However,
much of the code used for financial transactions is poorly written and susceptible
to hacking. Jason Hickey is applying mathematics to address this problem. His
group is making a software toolkit of automatic theorem provers that can find
errors and vulnerabilities in software. Mani Chandy is working in another network
application area, crisis management. His group develops sense-and-respond software
for quick communication between responders and recipients in the event of an
earthquake, terrorist attack, or epidemic.
