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Congratulations to Rachel McAmis and Rachel Hong for passing their qualifying exams! Rachel McAmis, a member of the UW Security and Privacy Research lab and the UW Tech Policy lab, presented her work on “Privacy Threats and Concerns of Commercial Satellites”. Rachel Hong, a member of the UW Security and Privacy Research lab and the Washington AI Lab (WAIL), presented her work on “Evaluation of targeted dataset collection on racial equity in face recognition”. You can find more information on these projects by reading Rachel McAmis’s paper and Rachel Hong’s paper.

Huge congratulations to Miranda Wei for winning a coveted and well-deserved Google PhD Fellowship!! More information and all of this year’s winners on Google’s page here: https://research.google/outreach/phd-fellowship/recipients/.

Welcome to our new PhD students, Maddie Burbage and Yael Eiger, who have recently joined the UW Security Lab!

Prof. Umar Iqbal has moved on from his postdoc position in the UW Security Lab to start an assistant professor position at the Washington University in St. Louis. Congratulations to both WashU and to Prof. Iqbal! We are excited to see all the great research you will do next!!

The UW Security and Privacy Lab is excited to host several visiting researchers this summer: Jaron Mink, a visiting PhD student from UIUC; Sophie Stephenson, a visiting PhD student from Wisconsin; and Faith Strong, a visiting undergraduate researcher from Austin College. We’re excited to have you all join the lab community this summer!

Congratulations to Miranda Wei for passing her General Exam today and officially becoming a PhD “Candidate”!

Her PhD dissertation proposal builds in part on her excellent work studying gender stereotypes in computer security and privacy, which she recently presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy in San Francisco, and her work (and a wonderful collaboration with Google) studying advice for staying safe for hate and harassment online, which she presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Hamburg, Germany. Congratulations, Miranda!!

Check out Miranda’s papers here:

• “There’s so much responsibility on users right now:” Expert Advice for Staying Safer From Hate and Harassment. Miranda Wei, Sunny Consolvo, Patrick Gage Kelley, Tadayoshi Kohno, Franziska Roesner, Kurt Thomas. ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Apr. 2023.
• Skilled or Gullible? Gender Stereotypes Related to Computer Security and Privacy. Miranda Wei, Pardis Emami-Naeini, Franziska Roesner, Tadayoshi Kohno. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), San Francisco, May 2023.

Congratulations to newly-minted PhD and soon-to-be Professor Saadia Gabriel! Prof. Gabriel was co-advised by Yejin Choi (UW NLP) and Franzi Roesner (UW Security Lab), and she will be joining UCLA as an assistant professor in the fall of 2024, after some time as a postdoc at MIT then a Faculty Fellow at NYU. Congratulations, Prof. Gabriel!! MIT, NYU, and UCLA are all lucky to get you!

The UW Security Lab is lucky to work with a number of impressive undergraduate and 5th year Masters students among our researchers. We’re excited to share some of their work that was showcased recently.

At the UW-wide Undergraduate Research Symposium on May 19, Theo Gregersen (mentored by Prof. Franzi Roesner) presented his undergraduate thesis work on “Software-level Enforcement of Privacy Policies”. Chongjiu Gao, Sergio Medina, and their collaborators from the School of Art+Design (co-mentored by Prof. Roesner in CSE and by Prof. James Pierce in Art+Design) presented their work on “Arca, a Smart Home Camera for Your Entire Household: Designing, Prototyping, and Evaluating an Inclusive Security Camera that Improves Privacy”.

Then, at the first-ever Allen School Undergraduate and BS/MS Research Showcase on May 30, Camila Alvarez and Peter Mertan (mentored also by Prof. Roesner) presented their work on “A Visual Approach: Uncovering Mental Models of Security Threats Through Drawings”. Chongjiu, Sergio, and their collaborators presented again as well, and were recognized as runners-up for the People’s Choice Poster Award!

Congratulations to all of these budding researchers!

Congratulations to two Security Lab PhD students for being selected as National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recipients!! Cross-posting the details from Allen School News, written by Jennifer Webster:

Rachel Hong

Fellowship recipient Rachel Hong is a first-year Ph.D. student. She works with Allen School professors Jamie Morgenstern, who focuses on the social impacts of ML, and Tadayoshi (Yoshi) Kohno, co-director of the Security and Privacy Research Lab.

Combining ML, security and technology policy, Hong explores the behavior of existing ML algorithms in relation to privacy and fairness, as well as how to prevent those algorithms from being misapplied in society. As an undergraduate student, Hong was introduced to the field of algorithmic fairness through building a novel representation learning algorithm on biomedical data to help patients receiving care at a variety of hospitals in both rural and urban settings. Hong seeks to build on that foundation to improve algorithmic fairness through examining demographic biases in facial recognition technology to better understand how various modifications of training data can mitigate disparate outcomes.

Alexandra Michael

First-year Ph.D. student Alexandra Michael received a fellowship for her work that is co-advised by Allen School professors David Kohlbrenner in the Security and Privacy Research Lab and Dan Grossman in the Programming Languages and Software Engineering (PLSE) group.

Michael’s research combines her interests in security, programming languages and compilers. Prior to graduate school, Michael was fascinated by how computers could connect people yet put them at risk. Her work focuses on mitigating those risks by leveraging programming languages and security tools to improve the security and privacy of systems and the people who use them. She proposes to build a highly performant, secure and portable low-level language that will act as target for programs written in unsafe languages.

Congratulations to Tina Yeung for a great talk at the ACM Web Conference 2023 in Austin, Texas! Tina presented the paper “Online Advertising in Ukraine and Russia During the 2022 Russian Invasion“, which you can read more about here. And even more congratulations to Tina and her co-authors for having the paper selected as a “Spotlight Paper” for the conference, which means it was nominated for the Best Paper Award and received a longer (20-minute) presentation slot.