About Me
I am a Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. I am a member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute and the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs in Khoury College.
I am a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and an affiliate member of the Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity at Northeastern University School of Law.
My research seeks to investigate the sociotechnical systems that shape our lives using a multi-disciplinary approach. I believe that by increasing transparency we can also improve accountability of these systems. If you’re interested in my research, here is a quick primer on web privacy, here is a brief video about algorithm auditing, here is a longer video about our investigation of bias in hiring algorithms, and here is a video discussing the role of algorithm auditing in AI regulation.
Along with my co-PIs, I am currently working to launch the National Internet Observatory. This NSF-funded project seeks to gather data about the online habits of a large, representative panel of US residents and then make it available to qualified researchers around the world.
Research Highlights
Algorithmic Auditing
There is growing concern about the impact of powerful, opaque algorithms on our daily lives. In our work, we are focused on auditing algorithms: we use carefully controlled experiments to understand the data and algorithms used by companies, and assess the impact of these algorithms on normal people. Examples of our work include examining whether personalization and ranking algorithms on Google Search create partisan “filter bubbles”; understanding the role that ranking algorithms play in reinforcing gender and racial bias within gig-economy and traditional labor marketplaces; and critically examining online price discrimination and algorithmic manipulation in Amazon marketplace.
This work has appeared in IMC, CSCW, CHI, and WWW. More information, including source code and data, can be found on the project website.
Tracking and Privacy
Tracking is ubiquitous on the Web today, and yet we have only the most basic understanding of who collects data about us, and how this data is shared with third-parties. We are currently delving inside the tracking ecosystem to answer these questions, including investigating whether Android apps are surreptitiously taking audio and video recordings of users; developing causal methods to uncover the data sharing relationships between trackers and advertisers; and building models of the tracking ecosystem to understand user’s privacy footprint, and the efficacy of tracker-blocking strategies.
Based on our findings, we plan to empower users with tools to help protect their privacy. Our work on this topic has appeared at Usenix Security, NDSS, IMC, and PETS.
PKI and TLS
Public Key Infrastructure is the root of trust and security on the internet. Prominent examples include the SSL/TLS and DNSSEC PKIs. However, recent events like the Heartbleed vulnerability have demonstrated that critical PKIs are vulnerable to both software and human-induced failures. We are working to understand the threats to modern PKIs, and develop novel systems to address these challenges, including measuring whether website administrators followed best practices in the wake of Heartbleed; understanding how private keys for TLS certificates are shared with and aggregated by hosting providers; and building new systems to efficiently and proactively push certificate revocation information to web browsers.
This work has appeared at IEEE S&P, CCS, Usenix Security, and IMC. More information about our SSL/TLS research, including source code and data, can be found on the project website.