UW CSE’s Franzi Roesner addresses NAE Frontiers in Engineering Symposium
Every year, the National Academy of Engineering invites roughly 100 of the top engineers under the age of 45 from around the country to participate in its Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, a two-and-a-half day event focused on cutting-edge research in various fields of engineering. The 2015 symposium, which is taking place this week in Irvine CA, features a diverse range of topics, including the search for exoplanets, metamaterials, forecasting natural disasters, and cybersecurity and privacy.
It is an honor to be invited to the symposium, and an even higher honor to be invited to speak. This year, professor Franzi Roesner, co-director of UW CSE’s Security and Privacy Research Lab, delivered one of the opening talks of the program.
In her presentation, Computer Security and Privacy: Where Human Factors Meet Engineering, Franzi highlighted the challenge of designing technologies that match user expectations when it comes to security and privacy. She described a new model for granting permissions, “user-driven access control,” that removes the burden of making decisions from the user in favor of having the system automatically grant permissions based on how the user naturally interacts with existing applications.