Spring 2015

Abstract:

Cameras are now commonplace in our social and computing landscapes and embedded into consumer devices like smartphones and tablets. A new generation of wearable devices (such as Google Glass) will soon make 'first-person' cameras nearly ubiquitous, capturing vast amounts of imagery without deliberate human action. 'Lifelogging' devices and applications will record and share images from people’s daily lives with their social networks. These devices that automatically capture images in the background raise new privacy concerns, and suitable techniques are needed to identify and prevent the sharing of sensitive images. I will discuss our research exploring privacy harms of pervasive cameras, understanding people's privacy perceptions and behaviors in the context of lifelogging, and two mechanisms for detecting sensitive images.

Biography:

Apu Kapadia is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Informatics at the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Bloomington. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in October 2005. Following his doctorate, he joined Dartmouth College as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Institute for Security Technology Studies (ISTS), and then as a Member of Technical Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

Apu Kapadia is interested in topics related to systems' security and privacy. He is particularly interested in accountable anonymity; pervasive, mobile, and wearable computing; crowdsourcing; and peer-to-peer networks. For his work on accountable anonymity, two of his papers were named as 'Runners-up for PET Award 2009: Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies'. His work on usable privacy controls was given the 'Honorable Mention Award (Runner-up for Best Paper)' at the Conference on Pervasive Computing, 2007. Apu Kapadia has received five NSF grants, including the NSF CAREER award in 2013, and a Google Research Award in 2014.

Abstract:

What end-user applications might be newly enabled in the dozens of cities being newly wired for end-user gigabit by Google, AT&T, CenturyLink, and others? What might be the impact on citizens in these cities? How might gigabit provide an unfair advantage to smart cities? How might these capabilities and applications change the architecture for what we today call cloud computing?

Biography:

Dr. Glenn Ricart is founder and CTO of US Ignite, a national non-profit working closely with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science Foundation, and a dozen other large corporate sponsors who are working to answer these questions.

Abstract:

This talk focuses on the issue of "loss of control" that results when users outsource data and computation to the clouds. While loss of control has multiple manifestations, we focus on the data privacy and confidentiality implications when cloud providers are untrusted. Instead of following the well-studied (but still unsolved) path of encrypting data when outsourcing & computing on the encrypted domain, the talk advocates a risk-based approach to partitioning computation over hybrid clouds that provides an abstraction to address secure cloud data processing in a variety of system and application contexts. The talk will focus on two systems (a) SEMROD -- a secure map reduce platform for secure computing in hybrid clouds, and (b) Cloud Protect -- a middleware to selectively encrypt data stored in applications over the cloud based on user's security policies and workload.

Biography:

Sharad Mehrotra is a Professor in the School of Information and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine and founding Director of the Center for Emergency Response Technologies (CERT) at UCI. He has served as the Director and PI of the RESCUE project (Responding to Crisis and Unexpected Events) funded by NSF through its prestigious large ITR program. He is the recipient of Outstanding Graduate Student Mentor Award in 2005. Prior to joining UCI, he was a member of the faculty at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in the Department of Computer Science where he was the recipient of the C. W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. Mehrotra's research expertise is in data management and distributed systems areas. Mehrotra is the recipient of three test of time awards: ACM SIGMOD test of time award in 2012 for the paper entitled "Executing SQL over Encrypted Data in the Database-Service-Provider Model", the DASFAA 10 year best paper award of time award in 2013 for the paper entitled "Efficient Record Linkage in Large Data Sets", and the DASFAA 10 year best paper award in 2014 for the paper entitled "Efficient Execution of Aggregation Queries over Encrypted Databases". In addition, Mehrotra is a recipient of numerous best paper and awards including SIGMOD Best Paper award in 2001 for a paper entitled "Locally Adaptive Dimensionality Reduction for Indexing Large Time Series Databases", best paper award in DASFAA 2004 for the paper entitled "Efficient Execution of Aggregation Queries over Encrypted Databases", and best paper award in ACM International conference in Multimedia Retrieval, 2013 for the paper entitled "A unifying framework for context-assisted face clustering".