Information systems research at George Mason University
Authors: Jajodia Sushil , Barbará Daniel , Brodsky Alex , Kerschberg Larry , Motro Ami , Sibley Edgar , Wang X. Sean 
Published: November 2005

George Mason University began as an independent state university in 1972. Its development has been marked by rapid growth and innovative planning, resulting in an enrollment of more than 24,000 students in 1997. It is located in Fairfax, Virginia—about fifteen miles southwest of Washington, DC—near many governmental agencies and industrial firms specializing in information-intensive products and services.

Information and Software Systems Engineering (ISSE) is one of six departments in GMU's School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE). Established in 1985, SITE has approximately 90 faculty and ISSE has 13 full time faculty. ISSE is a rapidly growing department with wide-ranging teaching and research interests. The department offers no undergraduate degree programs and Master of Science degrees in Information Systems (MSIS) and Software Engineering (SWSE). MSIS has about 800 students and the SWSE has approximately 400 students enrolled. The MSIS program graduates about 120 students and the SWSE program awards 40 degrees per year. ISSE faculty participate in the SITE doctoral program in Information Technology. ISSE Faculty chair the committees of more than one third of the doctoral students in the SITE program, which currently graduates about 30 PhDs per year.

Two research centers are associated with the department: The Center for Secure Information Systems (Sushil Jajodia, Director) and the Center for Information Systems Integration and Evolution (Larry Kerschberg, Director).

Departmental research in information systems is supported by grants and contracts from several sources. The following awards have been received so far for the academic year 1997-1998 and beyond:

Knowledge Rovers: A Family of Intelligent Software Agents for Logistics for the Warrior. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (co-PIs: Kerschberg, Gomaa, Jajodia, Motro)

Electronic Commerce for Logistics, Teaming Agreement with American Management Systems for DARPA BAA 95-25 Logistics Research and Development (co-PIs: Kerschberg, Gomaa, Jajodia, Motro)

Linear Constraint Databases, NSF Research Initiation Award (PI: Brodsky)

Linear Constraint Programming, ONR (co-PI: Brodsky with late Kannelakis (PI), Van Hentenryck, and Lassez)

Towards Expressive and Efficient Queries on Sequenced Data, NSF Research Initiation Award (PI: Wang)

Supporting Multiple time granularities in Query Evaluation and Data Mining, NSF (co-PIs: Jajodia, Wang)

Fine Granularity Access Controls in World Wide Web, NSA (PI: Jajodia)

Information Flow Control in Object-Oriented Systems NSA (PI: Jajodia)

Exploring Steganography: Seeing the Unseen, NSA (PI: Jajodia)

Trusted Recovery from Information Attacks, Rome Laboratory (co-PIs: Jajodia, Ammann)

A Unified Framework for Supporting Multiple Access Control Policies, DARPA (PI: Jajodia)

The remainder of this article provides a brief overview of our research followed by a selected list of publications. More detailed information is available at www.isse.gmu.edu.