Collegiate Times

Virginia Tech stands as one of the most renowned schools in the state in the eyes of many, and at the top of the totem pole lies the top 1 percent of Tech faculty ? faculty whose scholarly attributions to society have gained national and even international attention. These scholars are presented with University Distinguished Professor and Alumni Distinguished Professor titles, presented in part by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors and Virginia Tech Alumni Association.

The university?s fall session of the ?Focus on Distinguished Faculty? program that began last spring is now underway. The program consists of lectures given by UDPs and ADPs that present pioneering research and put forward insight into the scholar?s accomplishments in their department or specific field of study.

In his lecture given Tuesday afternoon entitled, ?Chocolate Key Cryptography: A Delicious Way to Send Secret Messages,? mathematics ADP Ezra ?Bud? Brown spoke on the science of safeguarding information, specifically, the key to cryptography.

?If you want to send somebody a message and you want only them to be able to read it, you need to agree on two things: a method of disguising the system and the piece of information that is going to tell us exactly how the method is going to work,? Brown said.  ?The method is called the encryption algorithm or protocol and the little bit of information that makes it all work is called the key.?

Brown said the method used in cryptography is scrambling, and there are lots and lots of different ways. There are approximately four octillion different ways, in fact. That?s a four followed by 27 zeroes.

?Everybody knows you?re going to scramble. The method is known but the key is not. The problem is how you communicate that key to the other party with key management and distribution, since you want to make sure the key gets into the right hands,? Brown said.

Brown described the usefulness of public key cryptography, which is when there are two keys ? one used for encoding and one for decoding, where knowing one tells nothing about the other.

Brown illustrated the system by having a member of the audience place a note in a suitcase and lock it. Brown then placed his own lock on the suitcase, giving it back to the audience member who removed their lock, then giving it back to Brown who removed his lock and removed the secret note.

?Knowledge of the encryption key, the key used to scramble the message, gives you no useful information of the key that you would use to unscramble it. That?s the beauty of this public key cryptography ? it?s a way of sending messages where knowledge of the key doesn?t help the person,? Brown said.

Brown, whose first love is number theory, became interested in cryptography 15 years ago.

?It?s a great job. I was very honored and blown away at becoming an ADP. It indicated to me that I chose the right profession, I love to teach,? he said.

In psychology, UDP Thomas Ollendick, director of the Child Study Center at Tech, a specialty research, service and training facility devoted to understanding problems of childhood and adolescence, presented, ?Fears, Phobias, Rituals and Traumas: A Lifetime Journey.?

?Our research program attempts to understand, assess and treat diverse child psychopathologies from a social cognitive learning theory framework,? Ollendick said.

In his talk, Ollendick focused on anxiety and phobic disorders to illustrate the extent and reach of the Center?s work.
?There are two key developmental principles that guide our clinical research program: equifinality, in which any one given outcome might result from multiple and diverse pathways and multifinality, where any one cause or pathway can result in multiple and diverse outcomes,? Ollendick said.

Among others, Ollendick discussed studies completed on behavior inhibitions in infants, toddlers and children; the assessment of anxiety in children; and fear and the transmission of negative information among children. He also emphasized the importance of cross-cultural aspects of fear studies.

?What we have learned is we truly do need to take culture into consideration. Different cultures create and produce different phobias. As children may begin to take on more western values, then their fear levels may drop,? he said.
Ollendick said his lifetime of work and research could hardly be of much merit without the help of his team, including fellow faculty, researchers and family.

The third and final installment in the ?Focus on Distinguished Faculty? fall lectures will be given by the UDP of English, Nikki Giovanni, Dec. 6. Her talk is entitled ?Quilting the Black-eyed Pea (We?re Going to Mars).?