Grant Year: 2016

January 14, 2020

The Value of Respect: Reclaiming the Philosophical and Political Foundations of Informed Consent for the Era of Big “Things”

The proliferation of sensors, social networks, and massive data repositories presents an unprecedented opportunity to study human behavior. But this opportunity poses new challenges to the protection of individuals and groups by respecting privacy and autonomy, ensuring data security, and considering unforeseen consequences. Organizations have been left with research ethics…

January 14, 2020

Operationalizing Privacy for Open Data Initiatives: A Guide for Cities

Open data is a powerful tool for supporting digital citizenship. Sharing government data with the public can enable transparency, encourage civic participation, and empower communities. However, the information can be sensitive or carry privacy implications. Compliance with relevant laws and studying potential consequences can make the process costly for individual…

January 14, 2020

Cybercrime Science: Understanding Cybercriminal Networks and the Effect of Disruption

As technology evolves, abuse and cybercrime evolve with it. Cybercriminals today abuse and monetize every aspect of technology. However, understanding how criminals make profit from online abuse and the effective ways of disrupting criminal efforts is still ad hoc, often based off of anecdotal evidence, specific to a particular cybercrime…

January 14, 2020

Corrigibility in Artificial Intelligence Systems

This project will focus on basic security issues for advanced AI systems. It anticipates a time when AI systems are capable of devising behaviors that circumvent simple security policies such as “turning the machine off.” These behaviors, which may include deceiving human operators and disabling the “off” switch, result not…

January 14, 2020

The Internet’s Challenge to the State

The Internet is the latest in a long line of technologies promising to connect ever-increasing numbers of people. Despite obvious benefits, however, its potentially disruptive consequences for commerce, daily life, and governance are innumerable. Various actors including civil society, NGOs, international organizations, terrorist groups, and hacker collectives are now able…

January 14, 2020

Blazar: Secure and Practical Program Hardening

One root cause of cyber security threat is vulnerabilities in programs. Complex software inevitably have vulnerabilities which can allow attackers to exploit to compromise the system. We propose to design and develop a hardening solution to protect programs from attacks even when they may contain vulnerabilities. In particular, we propose…

January 14, 2020

Trust, Community, and the Production of Cybersecurity Professionals

There is a global shortfall in the number of qualified cybersecurity professionals required to fill critical roles in governments, industry, and society. Numerous education programs currently attempt to address this shortfall. However, the practice of cybersecurity requires more than just skills that can be learned in a classroom. We argue…

January 14, 2020

Security and Privacy of Biosensing at Scale

Next-generation ubiquitous biosensors will allow us to continuously monitor a wide range of physiological signals, from which many inferences can be drawn — our identity, our activities, our mental and emotional states, memories and thoughts, as well as predispositions to diseases and behaviors. Novel biosensing applications and business models will…

January 14, 2020

A User-Centered Perspective on Algorithmic Decision-Making

Algorithmic personalization drives much of the content we encounter online, from search results and movie recommendations to the ads we see and the prices we are offered. Much of this personalization saves us time and helps us find what we are looking for. However, personalization can also disadvantage individuals. Our…