SENIOR RECOGNIZED IN SECOND COMPUTER-SCIENCE COMPETITION

HHS senior Axel Hansen has reached the semifinals in a national science competition for the second time this school year. He is a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search. "This time," Axel says, "I win $1,000 and HHS will also get $1,000 to use." In November Axel reached the semi-finals in the annual Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, but did not win in the finals.

"I used a different research project for this competition," Axel writes. "My paper is titled 'Visualizing Network Anomalies for Intrusion Detection with Information Theoretic Metrics.' The project is to develop a computer program that can detect and visually depict when an attack occurs on a network. It would be useful to mitigate stealthy attacks on any network that has sensitive data or resources. I and my mentor at Dartmouth (Dr. Sergey Bratus) use a statistical technique from information theory to find changes in the 'nature' of network traffic, which can help indicate when and where an attack happens." Axel's paper can be found at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~axel/.