On May 9th, the Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF), an alliance of over 140 professional organizations, universities, and businesses, held their 24th Annual Capitol Hill Exhibition. CNSF supports the goal of increasing the federal investment in the National Science Foundation’s research and education programs, and the exhibition itself is a great way to show members of Congress and their staff what research the American people have funded.

Jingrui He (lower right) presents her research to a number of attendees of the 2018 CSNF Capitol Hill Exhibition.

This year the Computing Research Association, a member of CNSF, sponsored Jingrui He and her graduate student, Dawei Zhou, from Arizona State University. They demonstrated Dr. He’s research in complex anomaly/outlier detection. Her work, titled “Modeling the Heterogeneity of Heterogeneity: Algorithms, Theories and Applications,” earned a NSF CAREER award in 2016.

Dawei Zhou (right) presents his research to an attendee of the 2018 CSNF Capitol Hill Exhibition.

This research has wide ranging applications such as in financial fraud prevention and malicious insider threat detection. Dr. He spoke about the information sources she uses, the data heterogeneity (or quality of the non-uniform data sets) that’s typically present in such applications, as well as the techniques that can be used to leverage with data to identify the targets of interest (such as, new financial fraud patterns such as synthetic identities or lone wolf type of hacking attacks).

Jingrui He (center) presents her research to an attendee of the 2018 CSNF Exhibition.

All of this work is supported from the CISE directorate at NSF. Dr. He’s presentation was well received by the attendees of the exhibition, fielding questions from Congressional staffers, NSF Program Officers, and other attendees of the exhibition.

Dawei Zhou (right) presents his research to an attendee of the 2018 CSNF Capitol Hill Exhibition.

A number of other organizations had displays and were demonstrating NSF funded research at the event. From Cornell University’s “Cabernet, Copper, Caterpillar & Cement: Using High Energy X-Rays as a Multi-Disciplinary Tool of Discovery;” to the American Sociological Association’s “Opioid Distribution on a Darknet Cryptomarket;” to the American Political Science Association’s “Exploring Trade-offs in Cyber Offense and Defense Through the Lenses of Computer and Political Science;” the exhibition was a great display of the different types of research being supported by NSF. Look here to see a list of the participating organizations and what other exhibitors presented.