My undergraduate background is in software engineering and my career background is more related to human computer interaction. When I initially entered my graduate program I was focused on requirement engineering. Since then I’ve been given the opportunity to explore my research interest in more depth and I’ve found the area of usable privacy and security. This research area is just becoming prevalent as people realize that most security functions are being ignored or bypassed because they aren’t usable for the average person. Much of my research has focused on authentication methods for the web, including fallback authentication methods such as security questions.
Through the reading I have done, I’ve noticed that the user is often typecast and misunderstood. The research that I am doing now focuses on the different ways that people think and act towards computer security and privacy. The goal of this research is to ensure that we are designing for the right user and that we really do understand our users.
Master’s Thesis Title: Privacy and Security Attitudes, Beliefs and Behaviours: Informing Future Tool Design.
Persona Presentation
Full Thesis
Publications
A case study of using grounded analysis as a requirement engineering method: Identifying personas that specify privacy and security tool users (link)
publication date Jan 15, 2018 – Science of Computer Programming
Privacy Personas: Clustering Users via Attitudes and Behaviors toward Security Practices (link)
publication date May 7, 2016 – CHI ’16 Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Coursework
CS645 – Software Requirements Specification and Analysis
CS692 – Social Implications of Computing
CS886 – Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence – Preference Elicitation
Course project: Towards Enhancing Trust and Accuracy in Preference Elicitation (PDF)
CS858 – Advanced Topics in Cryptography Security and Privacy
Course Project: Usability Study of the Open Audit Voting System Helios (PDF)
CS889 – Advanced Topics in Human Computer Interaction – Experimental Methods
Course Project: Creating Security Personas to Support Security and Privacy Design