Areas of Research

Our research covers a wide range of topics which are essential to the development of technology that can be used to build socially responsible systems. These are our main lines of research (see our publications page for more details)

Engineering privacy-preserving systems

The the users’ awareness of the invasive nature of many on-line services and mobile devices in our daily lives has put Privacy Technologies in the spotlight. While the need for privacy is undisputed, how to design and deploy privacy-preserving systems is not well understood yet, this prevents the finding of solutions that would enable society to enjoy technological progress but also avoid damaging our societal values.

At the SPRING Lab we work on the development of building blocks allowing engineers to build privacy-systems as well as on methodologies enabling them to think in a systematic way about both the design and the evaluation of privacy-preserving technologies.

At the SPRING Lab we work on developing building blocks that engineers can use to build privacy-preserving systems, and methodologies that allow them to reason in a systematic manner both about the design and the evaluation of privacy-preserving technologies.

Impact of machine learning

At the SPRING Lab we try to understand the impact that machine learning has on society, and how it changes security and privacy problems. We research how machine learning could be used to help designers evaluate their systems design, and try to find principled ways to design defenses against attacks on privacy using machine-learning.

Privacy evaluation

As systems become increasingly complex, they gather and expose increasing amounts of data. This information can be extracted from content or meta-data (timing patterns, locations, etc).

At the SPRING Lab we work on the development of tools that would enable users to better understand how much information they reveal. We also build tools to help app developers achieve their goals without putting at risk the privacy of the users who contribute to the projects in an altruistic way.