Privacy, applied

Deep Learning (DL)-powered personalization holds great promise to fundamentally transform the way people live, work and travel, but poses high risk to people's individual privacy. This project will address the privacy risks arising in DL-powered contextual mobile services by developing solutions that facilitate the use of personal information while maintaining explicit user control over use of the information.

Technology advances have brought numerous benefits to people and society, but also heightened risks to privacy. This project will investigate mechanisms and build tools to help people make privacy-aware decisions in different online contexts. The outcomes will help people to better understand their own privacy preferences and behavior, and enable them to better manage their privacy on the Internet. The project will create designs that can be integrated into mobile app markets and web browsers. The results will also inform Internet standards and governmental policies on Internet privacy.

The Web browser is one of the most frequently used application by most people to perform common tasks such as shopping, social networking, emailing, banking, finding directions, and research on the Internet. Security threats and attacks targeting browsers or browser-based applications are becoming sophisticated as attackers are constantly developing innovative ways to exploit vulnerabilities of browsers and browser-based applications. Researchers, though, are making positive progress in mitigating risks from browsers to defend enterprise systems and consumer devices.

The economics of Cloud Computing Cloud Computing impels a fundamental shift in how data services are deployed and delivered, enabling flexible, dynamic outsourcing while reducing capital cost commitments for hardware and software. However, cloud computing also deprives customers of direct control over the systems that manage their data, raising security and privacy concerns.

Social networking and sensor-rich devices such as smartphones are becoming increasingly pervasive in today's society. People can share information concerning their location, activity, fitness, and health with their friends and family while benefiting from applications that leverage such information. Yet, users already find managing their privacy to be challenging, and the complexity involved in doing so is bound to increase.