Talk by Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Associate Professor at IIIT-Delhi, Visiting Associate Professor at IIIT Hyderabad, on Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM)

The Center for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP)

International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB)

organised a talk titled

Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM)

by

Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru (“PK”)

Associate Professor at IIIT-Delhi, Visiting Associate Professor at IIIT Hyderabad

3:00 pm – 4:30 pm on 10 October, 2018 (Wednesday)

Venue: Room 110, IIITB campus

26/C, Electronic City, Hosur Road, Bangalore

About the talk: 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.

Speaker Bio: Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru (“PK”) is an Associate Professor at IIIT-Delhi and is currently on sabbatical as a Visiting Associate Professor at IIIT Hyderabad. He is a TEDx and an ACM Distinguished speaker & ACM India Eminent Speaker. In addition to his contributions to academia, PK is on advisory role on various government organizations and a Fortune 500 company. PK received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His Ph.D. thesis work on anti-phishing research at CMU contributed in creating an award-winning startup – Wombat Security Technologies, wombatsecurity.com. Wombat was recently acquired for USD 225 Million. He is also part of various Board of Studies of different academic institutes across the country. He has co-authored research papers in the field of Privacy and Security in Online Social Media, Cyber Security, Computational Social Science, Data Science for Social Good, amongst others. He is passionate about solving societal problems using technologies, especially contributing to the domain of social computing. PK and his students have played an integral role in developing a technology used by over 80+ State and Central Government agencies in India. He has spent time making notable contributions at organizations like IBM India Research Labs, Adobe Research Labs – India, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) – Brazil, and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems – Germany. PK has served as a Program Committee member at prestigious conferences like WWW, CHI, PETs, ICWSM, CSCW, AsiaCCS. He was the Founding Head of Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre (CERC) at IIIT-Delhi. PK started and successfully manages PreCog (precog.iiitd.edu.in), a research group at IIIT-Delhi. PK can be reached at pk@iiitd.ac.in.

CITAPP at IIIT Bangalore is an interdisciplinary think-tank set-up to focus on the policy challenges and the organizational demands made by technological innovation. Of particular interest to the Centre is how technological advances, along with institutional changes that harness the legitimacy and the powers of bureaucracies and market, address the needs of underserved communities.