Bill Marczak, a PhD student supervised by Networking and Security Director Vern Paxson, studies how repressive regimes around the world use technology to repress activists. He wants to bring international media attention to this practice and develop technical solutions and training to give activists the ability to protect themselves against cyber-attacks from regimes.
“I bring a certain type of research which is so often missing from activism,” Bill said. He noted that activist research often lacks rigorous evidentiary standards.
In late May, web analytics company comScore agreed to pay $14 million to settle what is described as the largest Internet privacy lawsuit ever granted class-action certification. Mike Harris and Jeff Dunstan, the two plaintiffs, said that comScore’s analytics software was covertly bundled with other installations such as free screen savers, and that comScore tracked everything they did online, storing information such as web searches, credit card numbers, and even the contents of PDFs, and selling it to the company’s clients.
Björn Fritsche is visiting FrameNet for six months on a fellowship through the DAAD FITworldwide program, which also funds our German visiting agreement. He is a PhD candidate at the Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf.
Grad student Elior Rahmani is visiting ICSI, working with Eran Halperin of Research Initiatives’ bioinformatics team. Eran splits his time between ICSI and Tel Aviv, where he advises Elior. Elior recently received his bachelor’s degree from Tel Aviv University in Computer science and Biology (Bioinformatics); he began his master’s degree studies recently.
Barath Raghavan, who was at ICSI from 2010 to 2012, has rejoined ICSI's Networking and Security team to work with Scott Shenker, ICSI's chief scientist, director of Research Initiatives, Networking and Security researcher, and UC Berkeley professor. In his first tenure here, Barath's research focused on Internet architecture, but this time he will work on problems related to software-defined networking (SDN).
Marco Chiesa has joined Networking and Security and will be working with Scott Shenker on resilient routing tables.
Marco received his undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Roma Tre. He began his PhD studies there in January 2011 and expects to graduate this December.
Haihua Xu is visiting Speech through ICSI's visitor agreement with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Haihua received his PhD from Shanghai Jiaotong University in China and is now a researcher at Temasek Laboratories at the Nanyang Technological University. There, he works on acoustic modeling, the statistical representation of sounds that is used by automatic speech recognizers.
Two researchers joined Networking and Security this summer: Philipp Richter and Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez. Philipp is here on a summer internship, working with Networking and Security Director Vern Paxson. We get to keep Narseo a bit longer - he's joined the group as a postdoctoral fellow.
Jiashi Feng is here on a short stay, visiting Vision.
Jiashi received his bachelor's degree from the University of Science and Technology in China. He is currently a PhD student at the National University of Singapore, with a focus on computer vision, machine learning research, and its applications to multimedia. His research is on object classification - the ability for a machine to understand the content of images. He works mostly on feature learning.
Alexandros Kapravelos is visiting Networking and Security for the summer, working with Chris Grier and Vern Paxson.
Alexandros is originally from Greece and received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Crete. He is now a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara, where he is finishing his third year. His research focuses on making the Web safer. He has done some work on browser fingerprinting, which allows a Web page to uniquely identify visitors.
