Bijan Raahemi’s Analytics Study Receives Major Grant

Bijan Raahemi will use a new grant from NSERC to explore innovative algorithms and the application of data mining techniques to Internet traffic with the goal of recognizing and responding quickly to network attacks. Raahemi, an associate professor in management information systems and the founder of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Laboratory, will receive $105,000 over five years for this project, which is titled “Feature Engineering Using Bio-Inspired Methods For Internet Data Analytics.”

Accurate classification of Internet traffic is important from the point of view of both network security and network resources allocation. With the growth of Internet traffic, traditional identification methods for Internet data analytics face serious challenges when newer and/or malicious applications use randomly selected ports to communicate, making them increasingly difficulty to identify. As a result, there has been an increasing focus of late on the analysis of Internet traffic based on statistical behaviours using machine learning, evolutionary methods and data mining techniques.

The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms will be explored in two important applications: intrusion detection systems and anomaly detection for network security, and protocol identification of the Internet traffic for resource allocation and quality of service assurance