Events Calendar

CS Colloquium

Speaker: Dr. Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University

Talk Title: User-Controllable Security and Privacy: Lessons from the Design and Deployment of a Family of Location Sharing Applications

Abstract: Increasingly users are expected to configure a variety of security and privacy policies on their own, whether it is the firewall on their home computer, their privacy preferences on Facebook, or access control policies at work. In practice, research shows that users often have great difficulty specifying such policies. This in turn can result in significant vulnerabilities. This presentation will provide an overview of novel user-controllable security and privacy technologies and interfaces developed to empower users to more effectively and efficiently specify security and privacy policies. In particular, it will outline a new methodology to design expressive privacy and security policies that derives from new work in mechanism design and usability. Results from this research shed some light on why despite all the hoopla, most location sharing applications available in the market place today have failed to gain much traction.

Biography: Norman Sadeh is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His broad research interests include Web Security,
Privacy and Commerce. He is co-Director of the School of Computer Science PhD Program in Computation, Organizations and Society and of the School's Mobile Commerce Lab. Norman has been on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon since 1991. In the late nineties, he also served as Chief Scientist of the European Union's $800M e-Work and e-Commerce program, which at the time included all European-level cyber security and online privacy research. He has authored over 160 scientific publications, including several books and has also co-founded two companies to commercialize his technologies: Wombat Security Technologies and Zipano Technologies. Among other awards and honors, Norman was a co-recipient of IBM's 2004 Best Academic Privacy Faculty award. Norman received his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, an MSc, also in computer science, from the University of Southern California, and a BS/MSc in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics from Brussels Free University.

Host: Dr. Milind Tambe

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kanak Agrawal