SciTech High school projects

Altogether THREE projects have been created by PIs that involved participation from high school students in SAHI related areas:

• Projects 1 and 2: Two high school projects created by Co-PIs from HIM program have been accepted by the Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy (ScieTech). Each project will have two high school students. Project 1 (mentor Dr. Andi Saptono of HIM) is about mobile app security and privacy, and the other project (mentor: Co-PI Leming Zhou) is about genomic data security and privacy.
• Project 3: Palanisamy, Joshi and Pelechrinis are involved in Project 3 that will mentor a team of high school students on a healthcare privacy project as part of the SciTech Executive Experience program. The objective of this project is to test and validate the privacy features of our LEAF anonymous social network. LEAF is an anonymous social network for sensitive health related information among users. Such a need for private communication may arise, for instance, in specialized social network applications that focus guiding and intervening patients of sensitive and critical health diseases. As part of this project, we are developing a testing methodology for validating the anonymous social networking features implemented in our prototype social network system called LEAF. In the first phase of the project, the students plan to develop testing methods and design test cases for quantitatively validating the correctness of the features provided in LEAF. In the second phase, students will develop automatic test programs that test the app with the test cases designed in phase 1.

University of Pittsburgh Health Career Scholars Academy

In July 2015, Co-PI Palanisamy delivered a lecture on general data security and privacy issues related to healthcare to 107 high school students as part of the seventh year of the University of Pittsburgh Health Career Scholars Academy (formerly the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for Health Care). The lecture introduced basic awareness in data privacy and security to the students.

Data Security Workshop for Health Information Management Students

In May 2015, Co-PI Palanisamy had conducted a one day workshop on Data Security issues in healthcare to the undergraduate students in the department of Health Information Management in SHRS. The workshop lectures covered basic data security and privacy issues and had three lab modules covering various aspects of data security.

As part of our goal to expand collaboration and open channels for interfacing our research findings and educational opportunities to the needs of the SAHI and HIM-HP&S tracks, SIS and HIM programs have established close partnership with other IA efforts within the University and in other institutes.