From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu

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$750K donation to expand operations at KU Engineering’s National Center for Construction Safety
LAWRENCE — An anonymous donor has made a 10-year pledge to help fund ongoing operations at the Craig & Diane Martin National Center for Construction Safety at the University of Kansas School of Engineering. The $75,000-a-year donation “will be primarily used to hire researchers, to support research and to conduct construction safety studies,” said Chien-Ho Ko, the center’s director and a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering. The money will also be used for organizing activities such as construction safety symposia and conferences.

KU to host 21st annual event exploring latest in geographic information systems
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas will host the 21st annual GIS Day @ KU, an educational event to promote awareness of geographic information systems and the latest developments in the field. The virtual event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 9 a.m. Nov. 16. Presenters will include James Stewart, GIS manager for the Kansas Department of Transportation, and Daniel Reese, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, Topeka.

Full stories below.

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Contact: Cody Howard, School of Engineering, 785-864-2936, [email protected], @kuengineering
$750K donation to expand operations at KU Engineering’s National Center for Construction Safety
LAWRENCE — An anonymous donor has made a 10-year pledge to help fund ongoing operations at the Craig & Diane Martin National Center for Construction Safety at the University of Kansas School of Engineering.
The $75,000-a-year donation “will be primarily used to hire researchers, to support research and to conduct construction safety studies,” said Chien-Ho Ko, the center’s director and a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering. The money will also be used for organizing activities such as construction safety symposia and conferences.
The new pledge comes on top of the $3.5 million donation that Craig and Diane Martin made in 2018 to establish and endow the center. Craig Martin said he hopes the new donation attracts even more support to the center.
“There is ample opportunity to do things that could help impact both injuries and fatalities in the industry,” he said, noting that there are roughly 1,000 fatalities at U.S. construction sites every year and more than 100,000 fatalities globally. “Construction is one of the most dangerous jobs you could do.”
Making the industry safer, Craig Martin said, is about building the right culture.
“To have a safety program that works, you have to have a culture where the employees at all levels understand that caring for one another and watching out for one’s self, one’s family and one’s co-workers’ safety is fundamental.”
The new donation comes on the heels of an August symposium on construction safety hosted by the center. KU is the first of five institutions that are hosting safety conferences during the 2022-23 school year, under the auspices of the National Academy of Construction. Other universities include Worcester Polytechnic Institute, New Jersey Institute of Technology, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and a joint effort between the University of Texas-Austin and Texas A&M University.
“Engineering professionals are increasingly responsible for leading capital projects where the safety culture of the organization’s operations is important to protect life, injury and public safety,” the academy said in its overview of the series. “The goal is to prepare graduating engineers to be of greater value to industry and to be ready for the leadership roles they will fill in the future.”
Martin is a member of the academy and sits on its safety committee. When the idea of holding symposia at universities around the nation came up, he said, “I volunteered KU and the National Center to be the first university to do that, and that’s what we did.”
Participants in the Aug. 18 event in Lawrence included faculty members from universities around the region, CEOS at construction companies and KU students.
One big takeaway from the gathering, Ko said, is that those undergraduates will be ultimately responsible for instilling a safety culture in their future workplaces. One way to start, he said, is by building safety credentialing into engineering education.
“If we would like to push a construction safety culture at the undergraduate level, one way is to bundle the safety courses with a safety certificate. We believe that is more attractive to students,” Ko said. “That way we can guarantee that students who have this certificate have undergone related training about construction safety, including the academic and practical knowledge they need to enter the industry.”
Ko said the center intends to host a construction safety conference every year. The exchange of ideas between researchers in academia and people who experience real-world challenges is valuable for both sides, he said.
“We hope we can provide new ideas from the research perspective, and we hope to learn the practical issues in the construction industry,” he said.
For Martin, the August symposium was the sign of progress at the new center.
“We are one of only five universities to do this construction safety symposium this year. We care about safety culture and undergraduate education,” he said. “I think that’s a strong signal of KU’s leadership.”

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Contact: Chen Liang, Department of Geography & Atmospheric Science, [email protected]
KU to host 21st annual event exploring latest in geographic information systems

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas will host the 21st annual GIS Day @ KU, an educational event to promote awareness of geographic information systems and the latest developments in the field. The virtual event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 9 a.m. Nov. 16.

Organizers have invited GIS experts from academia, business and government for the Zoom event, password 2022. A full schedule is below:

Opening remarks
9-9:15 a.m.
David Mechem, professor and chair, Department of Geography & Atmosphere Science, KU

“What Is Truth?: When GIS Data Representing the Same Features Don’t Agree”
9:15-10 a.m.
James Stewart, GIS manager, Kansas Department of Transportation

“Utilizing Low-Cost Drone LiDAR for Topographical Survey: a case study”
10:15-11 a.m.
Christian Stallings, director of operations, Alynix

“Cloud Computing and Interactive Mapping with Geemap and Leafmap”
11:15 a.m.-noon
Qiusheng Wu, assistant professor, Department of Geography and Sustainability, University of Tennessee

“Latest Advances in Web GIS and Mobile GIS”
1-1:45 p.m.
Pinde Fu, software developer, team lead and author at Esri; adjunct faculty at Harvard University Extension

“The NWS Damage Assessment Toolkit: GIS Use in Tornado Damage Surveys”
2-2:45 p.m.
Daniel Reese, meteorologist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, Topeka.

For more information about GIS Day, visit the event page or email [email protected].

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KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
Phone: 785-864-3256
Fax: 785-864-3339
[email protected]
http://www.news.ku.edu

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs

From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu

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New approach could help protect consumer data exposed in purchase transactions
LAWRENCE — Whether they are shopping at Costco or watching Netflix, consumers are consistently exposing personal data. A new scholarly article co-written by a University of Kansas business analytics researcher shows how the commonly used consumer panel data in marketing research is subject to a high threat of reidentification. Shaobo Li proposes a new approach to protect such data so that a certain privacy level is guaranteed while the information loss is minimal.

Edward Hudson named new chief information security officer
LAWRENCE — Edward Hudson will join the University of Kansas as the new chief information security officer (CISO) beginning Dec. 5. Hudson brings 20 years of IT security and IT governance experience to the role. He previously worked as the CISO for the California State University system, overseeing strategic information security and privacy efforts for the 23 campuses of the CSU system.

Full stories below.

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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
New approach could help protect consumer data exposed in purchase transactions
LAWRENCE — Whether they are shopping at Costco or watching Netflix, consumers are consistently exposing personal data. Even though companies may be taking reasonable precautions to protect customers (including those provisions required by law), the distinctiveness of purchasing patterns creates a privacy vulnerability.
“Your data is basically everywhere,” said Shaobo Li, assistant professor of business analytics at the University of Kansas.
His new article titled “Reidentification Risk in Panel Data: Protecting for k-Anonymity” shows how the commonly used consumer panel data in marketing research is subject to a high threat of reidentification, which can be exploited by intruders. He proposes a new approach to protect such data so that a certain privacy level is guaranteed while the information loss is minimal. It appears in Information Systems Research.
“Many people don’t realize your purchases can be linked to your identity,” Li said.
“Most understand that a combination of your demographic information — such as age, gender and ZIP code — can be linked. But nowadays, if you open your app store in iPhone, you can see there is a privacy notice — and the first one is your purchase history — and that’s going to be linked to your identity. Purchases are definitely something we need to protect.”
Co-written by Matthew Schneider of Drexel University, Yan Yu of University of Cincinnati and Sachin Guptad of Cornell University, the article studied consumer panel data, which is frequently used in marketing. So regardless of whether you’re buying candy bars or over-the-counter medicine, a business usually stores this information. What Li found was that as high as 94% of the consumers in the panel data they studied can be reidentified based on purchases of a single product category (e.g., carbonated beverage).
This reidentification is accomplished through a potential data linkage based on the uniqueness of the purchase. For example, if a consumer buys Fig Newtons, a potted plant and a can of Lysol, that combination of goods has a unique element compared to others. (Supposedly anonymous Netflix customers were identified by cross-referencing their viewings with ratings on the Internet Movie Database, giving intruders access to email addresses and, ultimately, credit card data.)
While legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) offers some safeguarding against identity theft, Li and his team propose a new solution: graph-based minimum movement k-anonymization. This method artificially yet minimally alters certain purchases so that in the protected data, any purchase appears across at least some different customers in a panel data.
Li said that k-anonymity “is a very well-established privacy model, which means essentially any individual is not standing out based on linkable information.
“Data privacy protection is challenging in both industry and academia. Although there are many existing data protection approaches out there, companies should understand users’ needs before picking up a method because many approaches can drastically destroy the data in order to achieve privacy. In other words, data utility is a very important aspect in data privacy protection.”
In Li’s work, the proposed method optimizes (maximizes) the data utility while guaranteeing k-anonymity.
Now in his fifth year at KU, Li was trained as a statistician. In addition to statistical research, he has written extensively on data privacy issues in marketing, including “A Flexible Method for Protecting Marketing Data: An Application to Point-of-Sale Data” for Marketing Science and “Protecting Customer Data: Marketing with Second-Party Data” for the International Journal of Research in Marketing.
He said, “The number one lesson for the type of company that collects consumer data and conducts marketing research is — even though they operate under government regulations, and they remove the consumer’s name, address and email address — privacy issues still remain.”
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Contact: Genevieve Prescher, Office of the Provost, 785-864-0317, [email protected]
Edward Hudson named new chief information security officer
LAWRENCE — Edward Hudson will join the University of Kansas as the new chief information security officer (CISO) beginning Dec. 5.
Hudson brings 20 years of IT security and IT governance experience to the role. He previously worked as the CISO for the California State University system, overseeing strategic information security and privacy efforts for the 23 campuses of the CSU system.
Hudson also served as faculty director for the EDUCAUSE Management Institute, in Louisville, Colorado, where he helped oversee and lead management training sessions with a goal to improve the impact of information technology in higher education. He also worked as a director of security services and maintains a number of professional certifications, including information security manager certification.
“Ed’s seasoned background in IT collaboration and governance, leadership and strategic planning provide him with the diverse skill set necessary to lead KU’s information security efforts,” KU Chief Information Officer Mary Walsh said.
Hudson holds a Master of Public Administration with a concentration in leadership from California State University San Bernardino, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology at the University of Phoenix, Novato, California.
The chief information security officer is responsible for the information security strategy and operations for the Lawrence and Edwards campuses and working to ensure KU is using best practices to protect student, personnel and intellectual property information.
“We are very excited to have Ed Hudson join the KU IT team, and KU community, as our chief information security officer,” Walsh said. “Ed has extensive experience in cybersecurity, specifically in higher education and research. I am highly confident he will be a wonderful addition to our team and a great partner for everyone in our community.
Ed will be an impactful leader for KU’s information security environment and will continue to build on the existing strategy and culture of security across KU’s several campuses and online learning community.”

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KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
Phone: 785-864-3256
Fax: 785-864-3339
[email protected]
http://www.news.ku.edu

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs

From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu

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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Study: Pandemic disrupted city sustainability efforts yet increased focus on initiatives
LAWRENCE — The COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to reexamine their priorities. Local governments were no exception, and a new study from the University of Kansas has found that while the pandemic did cause municipalities to adjust their focus on sustainability efforts, it did not devastate them, and in some cases, caused cities to put new emphasis on certain types of sustainability initiatives.
In recent years, many city governments have made climate protection and sustainability efforts part of their stated goals, yet they are not among the organizations’ traditional responsibilities. Given the possibility to view them as secondary, Rachel Krause, professor of public affairs & administration at KU, conducted a study to see how the pandemic affected cities’ environmental, social and economic sustainability efforts. Results showed that almost half of cities reported the pandemic hurt the implementation of their sustainability programming, but many also increased the priority they place on economic and social sustainability initiatives.
The study analyzed survey data from 591 American cities. Since 2010, every five years Krause and colleagues administer a sustainability policy survey to all U.S. cities with a population greater than 20,000. The most recent survey fell at the end of 2020, still during the first wave of the pandemic.
“The plan was to administer the survey regardless. But, given it was happening in the midst of the pandemic, we decided to ask some questions about it,” Krause said. “COVID has clearly changed how people do business, how collaboration happens and so much more. We wanted to see if it’s changed how cities view and implement sustainability initiatives.”
The study, co-written with Chris Hawley of the University of Central Florida and Angela Park of Kansas State University, was published in the journal State and Local Government Review.
The survey examined how U.S. cities are addressing sustainability in terms of their environmental, social and economic efforts, and it asked if the pandemic negatively affected, did not affect or improved the implementation, staffing and funding of those programs. Almost half of cities said program implementation was negatively affected. However, 75% said sustainability staffing was not affected, and 57% said sustainability funding was not affected.
The results also showed that cities with more Democratic-leaning populations were more likely to report that the pandemic negatively affected all three and that cities that included sustainability principles in their city plan or had dedicated sustainability staff reported more negative effects. That could be because cities that were already focusing more on sustainability were naturally more likely to notice the effects of the pandemic on a city priority.
“More Democratic-oriented cities may have also taken a more focused response to COVID, leading potentially to more challenges with sustainability and other ‘non-core’ functions,” Krause said. “That might also be a factor of when folks are paying attention to it, there could be a greater sensitivity to these disruptions and deviations from the road map.”
In terms of the three domains of sustainability, 51% of respondents said that COVID increased the priority their city put on economic sustainability efforts. Thirty-two percent said social equity efforts increased, while only 10% reported environmental sustainability efforts increased in priority.
“In response to a crisis or disruption, organizations may default to emphasizing their traditional strengths and priorities,” Krause said. “Economic development is one of the traditional focuses of a city government. But COVID highlighted and exposed many existing social cleavages, and there’s an argument that can be made that it also enhanced cities’ focus on social issues. This is significant because social equity is often viewed as a ‘forgotten pillar’ of sustainability.”
The study’s findings also suggest the pandemic did not have as large of an effect on local sustainability efforts as some may have originally thought. The pandemic may be a once-in-a-generation event, but it can illustrate how major disruptions — whether from natural disasters, social or economic upheaval or public health emergencies — can influence which local government functions are affected, even if indirectly.
Krause, who researches sustainability in cities and how such efforts are successfully implemented and carried out said the study can also help illuminate what sustainability means to different cities, based on their unique priorities and characteristics.
“Sustainability is a broad concept, which is something that is often criticized about it,” Krause said. “However, there is a benefit to that breadth and flexibility. If COVID shined a light on a local weakness in one dimension, attention can shift to where it is needed to work towards the long-term balance that sustainability calls for.”
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KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
Phone: 785-864-3256
Fax: 785-864-3339
[email protected]
http://www.news.ku.edu

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs