Data Structures Handbook

At its core, information security deals with the secure and accurate transfer of information. While information security has long been important, it was, perhaps, brought more clearly into mainstream focus with the so-called “Y2K” issue. Te Y2K scare was the fear that c- puter networks and the systems that are controlled or operated by sofware would fail with the turn of the millennium, since their clocks could lose synchronization by not recognizing a number (instruction) with three zeros.

Reliable human authentication schemes are of paramount importance in our highly networked society. Advances in biometrics help address the myriad of problems associated with traditional human recognition methods. The performance and benefits of a biometric system can be significantly enhanced by consolidating the evidence presented by multiple biometric sources. Multibiometric systems are expected to meet the stringent performance requirements imposed by large-scale authentication systems.

The proliferation of massive data sets brings with it a series of special computational challenges. This "data avalanche" arises in a wide range of scientific and commercial applications. With advances in computer and information technologies, many of these challenges are beginning to be addressed by diverse inter-disciplinary groups, that indude computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians and engineers, working in dose cooperation with application domain experts. High profile applications indude astrophysics, bio-technology, demographics, finance, geographi­ cal information systems, government, medicine, telecommunications, the environment and the internet. John R. Tucker of the Board on Mathe­ matical Seiences has stated: "My interest in this problern (Massive Data Sets) isthat I see it as the rnost irnportant cross-cutting problern for the rnathernatical sciences in practical problern solving for the next decade, because it is so pervasive.