Abstract: The best online ads are well-targeted, unobtrusive, and even useful. But ads can also go far astray. For example, various scammers claim payment for purportedly delivering ads, when in fact the ads were invisible, duplicative, or never shown at all. For advertisers, this fraud wastes limited budgets. For publishers and networks, fraud...
Title: Machines and Manners: Android Automata and Sentimental Body Techniques in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Abstract: This paper explores the relationships between sentiments and mechanical machinery in the German Enlightenment through an investigation of two android automata that both display women playing a keyboard instrument. I analyze the two women automata’s mechanical motion and musical...
Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm Place: Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area
Speaker: Stuart Shieber
Title: The Future of Open Access, and How to Stop It
Abstract: Efforts such as the open access policies enacted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Law School are intended to promote the broadest access to the university’s scholarly writings by retaining rights to distribute scholarly articles according to the principles of “open access”. There are reasonable...
Title: Receipt-Free Universally-Verifiable Voting With Everlasting Privacy
Abstract: Using cryptographic techniques, it is possible to design a fair voting system whose correct operation can be verified by anyone, while still retaining ballot secrecy. Such voting schemes are called “Universally Verifiable”. If, in addition, the voting scheme prevents vote buying and coercion, we say it is “receipt...
Title: Life in the network– the coming age of computational social science
Abstract: An increasing fraction of human interactions are digitally captured. These digital breadcrumbs create enormous opportunities for ground breaking social science. This talk will discuss what some of the potential opportunities are, as well the potential barriers to the emergence of a “computational social science...
Title: Deceptive Phishing Research: Moral Questions and Legal Issues
Abstract: Researchers are increasingly turning to live, “in the wild” phishing studies of users, who unknowingly participate without giving informed consent. Such studies can expose researchers to a number of unique, and fairly significant legal risks. This talk will introduce four case studies highlighting...
Abstract: While the press raves about the coming revolution of “personalized medicine”, it remains a challenge for an individual to obtain simply a usable copy of their complete medical record. Recently, Microsoft, Google, and the Dossia consortium each launched their own version of Personally Controlled Health Records (PCHRs), technology that...
Date: Wednesday, October 8, 2008 Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm Place: Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area
Speaker: John Viega
Title: Why Anti-Virus sucks, and how to fix it
Abstract: Anti-virus software (AV) is found on most Windows desktops (well over 90%). Many people are amazed that it is so ubiquitous, because it is so widely reviled. Technical people will often claim that AV “doesn’t work”, and that it “causes stability problems”. And almost everyone will claim that it “slows your machine down”. While...
Title: An Empirical Analysis of Phishing Attack and Defense:
Abstract: A key way in which banks mitigate the effects of phishing attacks is to remove the fraudulent websites and abusive domain names hosting them. We have gathered and analyzed empirical data on phishing website removal times and the number of visitors that the websites attract. We find that website removal is part of the answer...
Abstract: In the old days, computer scientists tended to be of the opinion that the goal of computer scientists was to construct machines and the goal of social scientists was to get society to accept them. There is no doubt that traditional approaches to computer science research have revolutionized the world in which we live, but past success using...
Also read about the 2020 Rising Stars Workshop, where 60 of the brightest rising stars in AI for Social Impact (AISI), their research and activities all mentored by senior AISI faculty and researchers.
