Mining Massive Data Sets for Security

Abstract

The NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on Mining Massive Data Sets for Security, held in Villa Cagnola, Gazzada (Italy) from 10 to 21 September 2007, brought together around 90 participants to discuss these issues. The scientific program consisted of invited lectures, oral presentations and posters from participants. The present volume includes the most important contributions, but can of course not entirely reflect the lively interactions which allowed the participants to exchange their views and share their experience.

The book is organized along the five themes of the workshop, providing both introductory reviews and state-of-the-art contributions, thus allowing the reader a comprehensive view of each of the themes. The bridge between academic methods and industrial constraints is systematically discussed throughout. This volume will thus serve as a reference book for anyone interested in understanding the techniques for handling very large data sets and how to apply them in conjunction for solving security issues.

Section 1 on Data Mining brings together contributions around algorithms for learning large data sets. Section 2 on Search highlights the problems of scale and threats of the web. Section 3 on Social Networks presents the theoretical tools and various issues around very large network structures. Section 4 on Text Mining focuses on techniques to extract structured information from multilingual and very large text collections. Finally, Section 5 presents various applications of the mentioned techniques to security: fraud, money laundering, intelligence, terrorism, geolocalization, intrusion. The ASI event and the publication of this book have been co-funded by the NATO Program ¿Science for Peace and Security¿, by the European Commission¿s (EC) Enlargement Program and the EC-funded PASCAL Network of Excellence. All lectures have been filmed and are now freely accessible via the website http://videolectures.net/.

The NATO ASI was made possible through the efforts of the four co-Directors Clive Best (JRC, Ispra, Italy), Françoise Fogelman-Soulié (Kxen, France), Patrick Gallinari (University of Paris 6 ¿ LIP6, France) and Naftali Tishby (Hebrew University, Israel), as well as of the other members of the program committee: Léon Bottou (NEC Labs America, USA), Lee Giles (Pennsylvania State University, USA), Domenico Perrotta (JRC, Ispra, Italy), Jakub Piskorski (JRC, Ispra, Italy) and Ralf Steinberger (JRC, Ispra, Italy). We would like to thank the additional reviewers, whose valuable feedback helped to improve the quality of this book: Spyros Arsenis, Thierry Artières, Carlo Ferigato, Nicholas Heard, Hristo Tanev, Cristina Versino, Dennis Wilkinson and Roman Yangarber. Our special thanks go to Sabine Gross (Public Relations, JRC Ispra) for her dedication and the endless hours she spent on organizing the ASI. Without her, the event would not have taken place.

June 2008 Clive Best and Françoise Fogelman-Soulié Domenico Perrotta, Jakub Piskorski and Ralf Steinberger