Kaiming Cheng passes General Exam

Congratulations to Kaiming Cheng for passing his General Exam and officially becoming an Allen School PhD candidate! Kaiming’s past and proposed work studies and addresses security, privacy, and safety challenges with emerging AR/MR technologies. The photo shows Kaiming celebrating with his dissertation committee.

Rachel McAmis and Rachel Hong pass their PhD Qualifying exams

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.

Introducing Prof. Iqbal

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!!

Miranda Wei presents at CHI 2023 and IEEE S&P 2023, passes General Exam

Miranda Wei presenting "Skilled or Gullible? Gender Stereotypes Related to Computer Security and Privacy" at the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy
Miranda Wei presenting “Skilled or Gullible? Gender Stereotypes Related to Computer Security and Privacy” at the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy

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:

Introducing Prof. Saadia Gabriel

Saadia Gabriel graduating with her PhD, along with advisors Yejin Choi (left) and Franzi Roesner (right)

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!

Showcasing Undergraduate and BS/MS Researchers

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.

Theo Gregersen presenting at the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium
Chongjiu Gao and Sergio Medina presenting at the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium
Camila Alvarez and Petek Mertan presenting at the Allen School Undergraduate and BS/MS Research Showcase

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!

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