Marianne Winslett

Ph.D. Stanford University, 1987

Research Statement

Professor Winslett has broad interests in the database area, with current focuses on data security and scientific databases.

In the area of data security, she is participating in the TrustBuilder project to develop automated trust negotiation, a new approach to access control and authentication for use in open computing environments. Such environments require nimble, flexible approaches to access control, so that entities from outside the open system can be allowed to make use of system resources. The traditional approach to access control in decentralized systems, namely, centrally administered, identity-based approaches, are inapplicable to open computing, as outsiders have no identity that is meaningful to the system. The goal of this work is to develop the underlying theory of trust negotiation, to provide a firm semantic foundation.

In the area of scientific databases, Professor Winslett's Panda project is focused on providing high-performance, portable, modular, and self-tuning approaches to I/O for high-performance parallel scientific codes.