Students

 

Current

In the Informatics PhD program Debin Liu is currently working on classification and effective mitigation of the insider threat challenge. His work, funded by the The I3P began with a stochastic gmae theoretic analysis of the insider/defender game and in moving on to to develop tools to incent security-aware behavior in the organization. He completed a series of examinations of proof-of-work as an economic proposal. Given that spammers use botnets, and thus face a different production frontier than legitimate email users, under what conditions will proof of work actually work?

The research of doctoral student Vaibhav Garg focuses on the intersection of classic risk perception, usabillity, and security. Computing online implies risk. His core research question is interdisciplinary: What elements of offline risk perception and communication can be applied online?

Doctoral student Zheng Dong is beginning his work on network security and databases. He finished his masters thesis in spring 2010 on the topic of the marginal return for adding an individual into a social network for the purposes of recommendation systems or discorvery systems.

Tonya R. S. Thompson is a recipent of the highly competitive NASA Research Fellowship. Her work with me had focused on effective risk communication. First, she is working on effective risk communication to end users using narratives, where she has already developed narrative communication mechanisms. Secondly, she is working on effective communication from naive users to designers in order to enable deisgns that address the legitimate but highly variable privacy concerns of individuals.

Doctoral Alumni

Warigia Bowman, PhD is a leader in addressing issues of the digital divide at The University of Mississippi. At Harvard, Warigia Bowman focused upon the global digital divide. She is perhaps the global expert on the digtial divide in Kenya. She has published case studies on Texas and African digital divide issues. She has developed a framework for the emergence of the digital divide on the national agenda based on political science and science and technology studies. Her publications include an analysis of UCITA. She is examining the role of technology strategic alliances among the public sector, non-governmental organizations and industry play in facilitating technology diffusion and infrastructure development to under-served geographic areas

Accepting a post-doctoral appoint to remain at Harvard, Allan Friedman is examining the multiple dimensions of privacy and security -- " privacy in public" and seclusion, CHI and security, as well as private sector and public sector responses to privacy. He has presented on the values embedded in the "broadcast flag" proposal, universal identifiers, and on communicating the state of trustworthy systems. He is a post-doctoal fellow at Center for Research in Computation and Society. An overview of his general area is in Phishing for Trust Online.

In computer science, Camilo Viecco has exapanded his studies of honeypot visualization to include the economics of security. Sensor probes distribute information both to attackers and defenders. Camilo has illustrated that while prevention of probe identification is not possible, it is possible to make such identification expensive for attackers and affordable for defenders while providing high quality information to the entire public.

J Duncan has completed his dissertation in computer science. His interests include: Artificial Intelligence, ALife, Malware defense, and User-Centered Trusted Computing. His dissertation focused on user-centered trust in computing.

While at IU Alex Tsow was a Visiting Researcher and Ph. D. student at Indiana University. There he investigated the roles of technology and economics on identity fraud. He has exposed a gaping vulnerability in the consumer wireless infrastructure. He is also developing an infrastructure to fight distributed phishing attacks. His thesis work is on design derivation, a interactive formal method for correct-by-construction system design. Now at RAND, he can no longer talk about his research.

At MIT Serena Chan focused on building a space-based backbone for satellite processing. A particularly interesting bit of work, she the technology and economics of moving beyond custom-designed hardware, to a space-based infrastructure.

Carlos Osorio completed one of the most significant models of the economics and market dynamics of open source software, showing that illegal copies serve to introduce, market and create lock-in in developing countries for closed code. His dissertation focused on the availability of broadband in American communities, and illustrated the power of competition.

Sabine Schaffer focused on consumer trust behavior on the web, and as my pre-doctoral fellow at Harvard she completed her dissertation. Her dissertation is the basis for The Role of Trust on the Internet: The Development of an Online Trust Creation Model for eTravel Agents, now available for purchase.

Another previous pre-doctoral fellow at Harvard, Sara Wilford completed extensive research on personal conceptions of privacy in the UK and the US. She is currently a researcher at Warwick Business School back in the United Kingdom.

Alumni

(not an all-inclusive list)

Informatics Lecturer and researcher Matt Hottell and Drew Carter, an Informatics masters student, completed a war-driving experiment in Bloomington that covered nearly 2500 wireless networks. Regression analysis illustrated that there was no significant effect in terms of predicting security for income or education. Nor does housing density predict use of security. Only router type predicts security use. Those routers with easy to use security and security as a default predict security use. And the selection of router is not correlated with the demographic variables.

Matt Deniszcuk,an undergraduate, worked with Matt Hottell and Drew Carter on data compilation. He used the recent war-driving data and did a comparison of data from the previous year. He discovered that despite the significant investment made by IU in security education, the presence of students in an apartment complex was correlated with a decrease in wireless security. This counter-intuitive finding was enabled only by careful experiment design. Future research will examine not only more changes over time, but be complemented by qualitative research on student risk perception.

Chris Reinking is an undergraduate who expanded the work originally done by Hottell, Carter and Deniszcuk to look at rates of change.

Also in computer science Shreyas Kamath.

Jessica Kinser has completed her undergraduate research in computer forensics and will be starting the Masters of Science in Security Informatics in fall of 2010.

Gayathri Athreya supported experimentation on human response to betrayals using a game-theoretic approach. She graduated with a Masters in Bio-informatics.

While at the Kennedy School my primary interaction was with students at the masters level. I have been fortunate to work with some exceptional students including Brian Anderson, with whom I wrote a paper on universal service in Bangladesh. Fu-Shoun Mao and I completed a study on the digital divide in Thailand.

With Charles Vincent and Serena Syme, our work focused on code as governance. Examining the popular code as law meme Charles and I examined Standards as Governance. Serena Syme did a comprehensive analysis of the various open and closed code licenses, resulting in papers on Code as Governance, Governance as Code as well as an examination of licenses as governance published as a comparison in Computers and Society.

I particularly appreciated Taiyu Chen who assisted in organizing the Harvard Voting Symposium and completed research on the economics of identity. Max Bishop did an award-winning analysis of the use of ICT in the FBI, which won the best thesis award (called a Policy Analysis Exercise at KSG).