We want to congratulate all the graduating AIR lab members including:
We wish these students all the best for the next chapter in their life journeys!
Marshini returned to her PhD Alma Mater, Gatech and the GVU center to give a talk on some of the work from AIR lab that focuses on making the Internet trustworthy and inclusive. A video recording of the talk is available here.
Our joint paper with SUPERgroup led by Maia Boyd received a CHI Honorable Mention award this year. This paper investigates how in-person Black Lives Matters protesters use online privacy and security advice.
Congratulations to Neha Lingareddy and Brennan Schaffner on their accepted workshop paper for the “What Can CHI Do About Dark Patterns?” Workshop to be held virtually at CHI 2021. They will be discussing barriers to deleting an account on the top 20 social media platforms in the USA.
AIR lab members, Shriya Bansal (Co-President/Event Director), Lucy Li (Events Lead), and Neha Lingareddy (Events Flex Chair) who help run CompileHer organized a hackathon online on Feb 6/7 for middle school girls. The theme was <interstell/Her> and creating awareness around space and the solar system. Adam Shaw and Marshini were judges for the competition and were impressed by the range of system designs the participants prototyped in a short amount of time! If you’re interested in helping with CompileHer, consider reaching out to these AIR lab members! Read more about the event here.
Arunesh Mathur received an outstanding dissertation award from ACM SIGCHI in 2021! Arunesh is a PhD graduate of AIR lab precursors, PrincetonHCI lab and NetCHI lab, and an honorary member of AIR lab. His work on examining various forms on online manipulation has been impactful on consumer protection regulations and in moving research forward on studying this online phenomena such as dark patterns of design. Congratulations Arunesh!
AIR lab’s Nick Gondek moderated a great panel of “experts in law, technology, and policy discussing the implications of the historic deplatforming of a US president, as well as recent moves by tech companies to mitigate hate speech and other harmful forms of speech online.” Panelists included:
• Amy Bruckman, Professor and Associate Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech
• Shagun Jhaver, Postdoctoral Scholar in the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
• Randy Picker, James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago
• Phil Stupak, Fellow at Harris Cyber Policy Initiative and Adjunct Lecturer at University of Chicago Graham School
Sadly, the event was not recorded but Nick did a great job! Well done Nick!
The AIR lab has two new papers coming out, both with fantastic collaborators. The first paper is a study of how Black Lives Matter novice in-person protesters manage privacy and security advice. This work will be presented at CHI 2021 and was conducted with collaborators in the SUPERgroup – Maia Boyd, Jamar Sullivan, and Blase Ur. The second paper is a study of how well users understand the difference between native and third party apps on Alexa and will be published in Transactions on Internet Technology. This work is also conducted with another great set of collaborators including David Major (Princeton), Danny Huang (NYU), and Nick Feamster.
You can read more about our Connecting Contexts project on the SPE4K project website which summarizes our work to date on Security and Privacy Education For Kids.
Marshini was awarded a CAREER award by the National Science Foundation to study the impact of educational technologies on school children’s privacy. You can read more about the project overview here. There is also a nice summary of my work on the UChicago CS department webpage which you can read here.