At reading group next Tuesday, 4/7, we have a guest from Brigham Young University, Daniel Zappala, who will give a talk on "Making a Difference: Values and Social Impact in Human-Centered Security and Privacy Research." Hope to see you there at 12:30pm in IRB 5105 or on Zoom! If you want lunch, please fill out this form by the end of Friday. Also, Dr. Zappala is interested in meeting with folks between 11am and 4pm to talk about research interests, so please consider signing up to meet with Dr. Zappala here: https://docs.google.com/
Abstract:
We rarely talk about values in the security and privacy research community, with science seen as pursuing an objective sense of truth that is independent of any researcher’s values or value system. Yet when we conduct research centered on humans, values are at least implicit in our research and sometimes are so central to the work as to be indivisible from it. In this talk I will discuss our recent research on human-centered threat modeling and how our work surfaced values as a key motivation and social impact as a central challenge. I will spotlight several cases of social impact within our community to illustrate the potential that our research holds. My hope is that we can start a conversation about how your values may be expressed in your work, how to be more open about our values with each other, and how shared values may lead to social impact that makes a difference.
Daniel Zappala is a professor in Computer Science at Brigham Young University. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. He started his career in networking research, including multicast, peer-to-peer networking and wireless networks. Mid-career he switched his research to security and privacy, with a focus on usability and human-centered problems. He runs the Usable Security and Privacy Lab at BYU, with recent work on authentication, secure messaging, and human-centered threat modeling. His passion is mentoring students on research projects, showing them how to center people and their needs as they develop security and privacy technologies.