Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES)

The U.S. electric grid is being transformed from a one-way channel delivering electricity from central power plants to customers at set prices, toward a distributed grid with two-way flows of information and electricity and dynamic distributed markets. The benefits of creating distributed markets for electricity are potentially great. Consumers can participate as buyers and sellers in these markets, utilities can reduce costly peak electricity load and risk of outages, and firms can be rewarded for innovation.

One of the crucial ideas behind Privacy by Design (PbD) is that privacy should be taken into consideration in the process of design, not merely after-the-fact, as so often happens. Yet, this ideal has failed to gain widespread practical traction, challenged, in part, by the lack of developed methodologies and also because of privacy's conceptual complexity, which hampers its operationalization.

Most of the world's internet access occurs through mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. While these devices are convenient, they also enable crimes that intersect the physical world and cyberspace. For example, a thief who steals a smartphone can gain access to a person's sensitive email, or someone using a banking app on the train may reveal account numbers to someone looking over her shoulder. This research will study how, when, and where people use smartphones and the relationship between these usage patterns and the likelihood of being a victim of cybercrime.

The threat and impact of cybersecurity breaches are felt throughout society with massive financial losses to businesses and breach of national secrets. Human behavior is increasing seen as a fundamental security vulnerability that is at the center of many security breaches. Several approaches have been used for improving user security behavior, including enacting information security policies, providing security awareness training, and introducing penalties for security violations; these approaches have not been very effective.

Validating a user's identity is one of the fundamental security requirements in cyberspace. Current authentication approaches require people to create and remember secret credentials such as complex passwords, or to possess special hardware authentication tokens. Both are vulnerable to being compromised, or illegally shared. Even worse, authentication is typically supported solely at the start of a session.