Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications

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    E-Infrastructures for clinical epidemiological studies across Scotland
    Sinnott, Richard O. ; McCafferty, Susan ; STELL, ANTHONY ; Watt, John (International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), 2008)
    As the proliferation of digital data about individuals increases the opportunities for leveraging this information to benefit society become correspondingly greater. This is especially true in the domain of e-Health where a large number of disparate clinical data resources exist around the world, often housed in individual systems, but with great potential to advance medical and health-care provision if harnessed together and linked with other data resources. In this paper we present a variety of projects that federate such health and other data through re-usable and adaptable e-Infrastructures targeted to the needs of the Scottish and wider e-Research communities. At the heart of all these systems and to counter societies natural wariness of such systems and their use of their personal information are fine grained and adaptable security systems which restrict and enforce access to data to authorised individuals. In this paper we outline these e- Infrastructure architectures, their associated security models and how we are applying them to support epidemiological studies.
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    Development of grid frameworks for clinical trials and epidemiological studies
    SINNOTT, RICHARD ; STELL, ANTHONY ; Ajayi, Oluwafemi (IOS Press, 2006)
    E-Health initiatives such as electronic clinical trials and epidemiological studies require access to and usage of a range of both clinical and other data sets. Such data sets are typically only available over many heterogeneous domains where a plethora of often legacy based or in-house/bespoke IT solutions exist. Considerable efforts and investments are being made across the UK to upgrade the IT infrastructures across the National Health Service (NHS) such as the National Program for IT in the NHS (NPFIT) [1]. However, it is the case that currently independent and largely non-interoperable IT solutions exist across hospitals, trusts, disease registries and GP practices – this includes security as well as more general compute and data infrastructures. Grid technology allows issues of distribution and heterogeneity to be overcome, however the clinical trials domain places special demands on security and data which hitherto the Grid community have not satisfactorily addressed. These challenges are often common across many studies and trials hence the development of a re-usable framework for creation and subsequent management of such infrastructures is highly desirable. In this paper we present the challenges in developing such a framework and outline initial scenarios and prototypes developed within the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project [2].
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    Grid infrastructures for secure access to and use of bioinformatics data: experiences from the BRIDGES project
    Sinnott, R. ; Bayer, M. ; Stell, A. ; Koetsier, J. (IEEE Computer Society, 2006)
    The BRIDGES project was funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to address the needs of cardiovascular research scientists investigating the genetic causes of hypertension as part of the Wellcome Trust funded (£4.34M) cardiovascular functional genomics (CFG) project. Security was at the heart of the BRIDGES project and an advanced data and compute grid infrastructure incorporating latest grid authorisation technologies was developed and delivered to the scientists. We outline these grid infrastructures and describe the perceived security requirements at the project start including data classifications and how these evolved throughout the lifetime of the project. The uptake and adoption of the project results are also presented along with the challenges that must be overcome to support the secure exchange of life science data sets. We also present how we will use the BRIDGES experiences in future projects at the National e-Science Centre.
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    Technical challenges in leveraging distributed clinical data
    Stell, A ; Sinnott, R ; Ajayi, O (IASTED, 2008-12-01)
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    Single sign-on and authorization for dynamic virtual organizations
    Sinnott, R. O. ; Ajayi, O. ; Stell, A. J. ; Watt, J. ; JIANG, J. (Springer, 2006)
    The vision of the Grid is to support the dynamic establishment and subsequent management of virtual organizations (VO). To achieve this presents many challenges for the Grid community with perhaps the greatest one being security. Whilst Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) provide a form of single sign-on through recognition of trusted certification authorities, they have numerous limitations. The Internet2 Shibboleth architecture and protocols provide an enabling technology overcoming some of the issues with PKIs however Shibboleth too suffers from various limitations that make its application for dynamic VO establishment and management difficult. In this paper we explore the limitations of PKIs and Shibboleth and present an infrastructure that incorporates single sign-on with advanced authorization of federated security infrastructures and yet is seamless and targeted to the needs of end users. We explore this infrastructure through an educational case study at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
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    Towards decentralised security policies for e-health collaborations
    Ajayi, O ; Sinnott, R ; Stell, A (IEEE, 2008-11-17)
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    Advanced security infrastructures for grid education
    Sinnott, R. O. ; Stell, A. J. ; Watt, J. P. ( 2006)
    This paper describes the research conducted into advanced authorization infrastructures at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and their application to support a teaching environment as part of the Dynamic Virtual Organisations in e-Science Education (DyVOSE) project. We outline the lessons learnt in teaching Grid computing and rolling out the associated security authorisation infrastructures, and describe our plans for a future, extended security infrastructure for dynamic establishment of inter-institutional virtual organisations (VO) in the education domain.
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    Blind data aggregation from distributed, protected sources
    Ajayi, Oluwafemi ; Sinnott, Richard O. ; STELL, ANTHONY ; Young, Alan (National e-Science Centre, University of Glasgow, 2008)
    Successful e-health research depends on access to and usage of a wide range of clinical, biomedical, social, geo-spatial, environmental and other data sets. In large scale, multi-centre clinical studies crossing geographical and organizational divides, the need to access, link and aggregate data securely is essential. Whilst the e-Science community have come up with a wide variety of technologies that support authentication and authorization, past experiences from working with organizations such as the National Health Service (NHS) in projects such as the MRC funded Virtual Organizations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project, have shown that irrespective of the technological advances and capabilities offered by the e-Science community, data providers themselves are typically unwilling to provide direct access to their data sets, i.e. through penetration of the NHS firewall for example from HE/FE. There are many reasons for this which we outline in this paper, both pragmatic and technological. Ultimately, data providers and the key stakeholders in this space are acutely aware of confidentiality and ethics concerns on data access and usage. They will only release their data provided it can be ensured that it is not possible to link it with other data sets that can result in potential violations of patient confidentiality for example through statistical disclosure. This paper presents a novel approach and its implementation that directly addresses these issues, providing a so-called Virtual Anonymisation Grid for Unified Access to Remote Clinical Data (Vanguard). Key features of Vanguard are its support for pull models of interaction with data providers such as the NHS, who do not necessarily have to open up their firewalls and thereby open themselves up to risks of attack; support of secure, anonymous data aggregation; support for novel ways in which data release to users undertaking research allows them to obtain and use data in a secure, disclosure free environment where third parties cannot access/use any released data. We demonstrate this through case studies applying the Vanguard system to clinical scenarios and systems working with the NHS in Scotland.
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    Secure, reliable and dynamic access to distributed clinical data
    STELL, ANTHONY ; SINNOTT, RICHARD ; Ajayi, Oluwafemi ( 2006)
    An abundance of statistical and scientific data exists in the area of clinical and epidemiological studies. Much of this data is distributed across regional, national and international boundaries with different policies on access and usage, and a multitude of different schemata for the data often complicated by the variety of supporting clinical coding schemes. This prevents the wide scale collation and analysis of such data as is often needed to infer clinical outcomes and to determine the often moderate effect of drugs. Through grid technologies it is possible to overcome the barriers introduced by distribution of heterogeneous data and services. However reliability, dynamicity and fine-grained security are essential in this domain, and are not typically offered by current grids. The MRC funded VOTES project (Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies) has implemented a prototype infrastructure specifically designed to meet these challenges. This paper describes this on-going implementation effort and the lessons learned in building grid frameworks for and within a clinical environment.
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    Supporting security-oriented, inter-disciplinary research: crossing the social, clinical and geospatial domains
    Sinnott, R ; Doherty, T ; Higgins, C ; Lambert, P ; McCafferty, S ; Stell, A ; Turner, K ; Watt, J (UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, 2008)