U. distinguished professor recently elected to international fellowship

On October 9, Jaideep Vaidya, a distinguished professor at Rutgers Business School and acting chair of the Department of Management Sciences and Information Systems, was elected to the cohort of fellows at the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), according to a press release.

The IFIP is a global, nonpolitical organization in information and communications systems, according to the release. The organization was created in 1960 under the authority of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Vaidya said that the fellowship, a lifetime appointment, is a recognition of the standard of his work and his contributions to his institution.

"These fellows are seen as a resource that (demonstrate) leadership and that can be reached out to with respect to providing advice … to any of the areas of expertise they may possess," he said.

He said he has been involved with the IFIP for approximately 20 years, working with its Committee on Security and attending the organization's conferences since 2005.

Vaidya said his work at Rutgers Business School includes valuing data and data extraction while preserving privacy. He said this work is closely connected to his fellowship because the IFIP focuses on data in the digital world and aspects like its privacy and security.

Vaidya said that his fellowship title comes from two areas, the first being his contributions to privacy-enhancing technologies. There are privacy concerns when collecting large amounts of data, and a lot of those concerns come from when that data is shared, he said.

Vaidya said that privacy concerns were a central concern during the U.S. and U.K. privacy-enhancing technologies challenge in 2023 — a competition that he, Xinyue Wang, a Rutgers alum and graduate research assistant at Rutgers Business School, Sitao Min, a doctoral candidate at Rutgers Business School, and Hafiz Asif, a Rutgers Business School alum, won in March.

Vaidya said that his team developed a two-step method for banks to find fraudulent activity without sharing credit card information across multiple platforms.

He said that the second area of his fellowship was his contributions to the access control aspect of data. He said that in large staffed companies, it is difficult to delegate access to different types of information and what those with access should do with said data.

"In modern information systems and large organizations, the way they make it easier to manage all of this is to have this notion … of roles," he said. "Essentially, you can play a particular role, and when you're playing that role, you have access to a particular set of privileges."

Vaidya said that he and several doctoral students worked on automatically verifying these roles for users. The formalization of the problem and an optimization perspective are now used in industries such as IBM and Tivoli Access Manager, he said.

He said that while his appointment as an IFIP fellow did not change any of his future goals, he would like to contribute to the organization by furthering his research and continuing his involvement.

Additionally, Vaidya said that he wanted to highlight students' contributions to his research.

"It is really to the credit of the intellectual diversity of our students as well," he said. "I do really want to highlight that fact and say that we are very fortunate because, at Rutgers, we have this intellectual curiosity and this diversity, which is what is really needed for great research, which then leads to things like this."