Credibility, Privacy and Policing on Online Social Media

Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK")
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India

1:00-2:00pm Friday, 14 October 2016, ITE 229, UMBC

With increase in usage of the Internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Orkut, Twitter and Flickr have changed the way the Internet is being used. There is a dire need to investigate, measure, and understand privacy and security on online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological). Real world scalable systems need to be built to detect and defend security and privacy issues on online social media. I will describe briefly some cool projects that we work on: TweetCred, OSM & Policing, OCEAN, and Call Me MayBe. Many of our research work is made available for public use through tools or online services. Our work derives techniques from Computational Social Science, Data Science, Statistics, Network Science, and Human Computer Interaction. In particular, in this talk, I will focus on the following:

• TweetCred, a tool to extract intelligence from Twitter which can be useful to security analysts. TweetCred is backed by award-winning research publications in international and national venues.
• How police in India are using online social media, how we can use computer science understanding to help police engage more with citizens and increase the safety in society.
• OCEAN: Open source Collation of eGovernment data and Networks, how publicly available information on Government services can be used to profile citizens in India. This work obtained the Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013 and it has gained a lot of traction in Indian media.
• Given an identity in one online social media, we are interested in finding the digital foot print of the user in other social media services, this is also called digital identity stitching problem. This work is also backed by award-winning research publication.

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK") is an Associate Professor, at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, India from Aug 2009. He is currently the Hemant Bharat Ram Faculty Research Fellow, and the Founding Head of Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre. PK is an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is primarily excited about and works with a bunch of smart students and collaborators around the world on the issues related to Privacy and Security in Online Social Media, Computational Social Science, and Data Science for Social Good. In the past seven years of his faculty life, he has managed projects close to a $800,000 USDs. PK has received research funds from multiple departments of the Government of India, National Science Foundation, Adobe, RSA, and International Development Research Centre. PK is part of multiple government initiatives / projects in the area of Cybersecurity in India. Technology that PK and his students have developed at IIIT Delhi is currently being used by 40+ different State and Central Government agencies in India. PK has spent his summer sabbaticals at IBM India Research Labs, Adobe Research Labs - India, and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. He is currently visiting Max Planck Institute for Software Systems for Summer 2016. PK regularly serves as a PC member at prestigious conferences like WWW, ICWSM, CSCW, AsiaCCS and he also serves as a reviewer for International Journal of Information Security and ACM's Transactions on Internet Technology. PK's Ph.D. thesis work on anti-phishing research at CMU has contributed in creating an award winning start-up Wombat Security Technologies, which recently raised Series C funding and also acquired a company. PK founded and manages the PreCog research group at IIIT-Delhi. Host: Anupam Joshi, joshi@umbc.edu