Past Events

From Privacy to Anti-Discrimination: How Policy Is Evolving to Address Some of the Worst Data-Driven Harms

• Date: April 6, 2022
• Time: 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm ET
• Location: 265 Joyce Cummings Center (NEW LOCATION!)
• Speaker: Nick Rabb, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science department, Tufts University
• Abstract: Understanding the spread of false or dangerous beliefs—often called misinformation or disinformation—through a population has never seemed so urgent. We introduce a cognitive cascade model that combines a network science belief cascade approach with an internal cognitive model of the individual agents as in opinion diffusion models as a public opinion diffusion (POD) model, adding media institutions as agents which begin opinion cascades. We show that the model, even with a very simplistic belief function to capture cognitive effects cited in disinformation study (dissonance and exposure), adds expressive power over existing cascade models, and serves to investigate the complex phenomena underlying belief in disinformation.
• To register: Email joshua.anderson@tufts.edu.

Intelligent Planning for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Coordination

• Date: March 8, 2022
• Time: 3:00 pm ET
• Location: Cummings 601 and Zoom
• Speaker: Jiaoyang Li, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC).
• Abstract: Robots will play a crucial role in the future and need to work as a team in increasingly more complex applications. But how to coordinate robots intelligently is a difficult problem: In this talk, Li will introduce intelligent planning algorithms for solving this challenge with a focus on one fundamental problem: letting a large team of agents navigate without collisions in congested environments while minimizing their travel times. Li will present principled planning algorithms that can efficiently coordinate hundreds of agents while providing rigorous guarantees on completeness and even optimality. Li will also present techniques to apply these algorithms to real-world problems with robustness guarantees, such as warehouse robot coordination, multi-robot motion planning, railway planning, and airport surface operation.
• To register: Email colloquia@cs.tufts.edu

2022 Student Symposium in Cybersecurity Policy

• Date: March 11, 2022
• Location: Virtual (Zoom)
• 9:30 am-9:40 am: Welcome Remarks | Professor Josephine Wolff, Tufts University
• 9:40 am-10:20 am: Paper Session #1: “New Challenges for the Medical Devices’ Cybersecurity in the EU” by Elisabetta Biasin and Erik Kamenjasevic, KU Leuven Centre for IT & IP Law | Discussants: Patricia Vargas-Leon – Postdoctoral Fellow, Tufts University & Scott Schackelford – Associate Professor, Indiana University
• 10:20 am-11:00 am: Paper Session #2: “The Art of Dismantling Cyber Privateering: Building Better Policies and Regulations to Disable State-Sponsored Cyber Actors and Protect Society and Trade” by Marc Toledo, Imperial College London| Discussants: Justin Canfil – Postdoctoral Fellow, Tufts University & Erica Borghard – Assistant Professor, U.S. Military Academy at West Point
• 11:00 am-11:05 am: Break
• 11:05 am-11:45 am: Paper Session #3: “Impact of GDPR on the Future of Internet Commerce” by Evgenia Sidorova, Georgia Institute of Technology | Discussants: Josephine Wolff – Associate Professor, Tufts University and Carolyn Gideon – Assistant Professor, Tufts University.
• 11:45 am-12:25 pm: Paper Session #4: “Cybersecurity in Practice: Exploring Resistance to Cybersecurity Practitioners and Security Practices on the Ground” by Jillian Kwong, University of Southern California | Discussants: Laurin Weissinger – Lecturer, Tufts University & Andrew Dwyer – Addison Wheeler Research Fellow, Durham University
• 12:25 pm-12:30 pm: Break
• 12:30-1:30: Keynote Presentation: “Towards a New Definition of Complementarity: The Interdependence of Liberal Arts and Computer Security”| Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, Pacific McGeorge School of Law, Dean Emerita
• To register: Email joshua.anderson@tufts.edu

Elizabeth Rinfdskopf-Parker is the former general counsel of the National Security Agency (1984–1989), principal deputy legal adviser at the U.S. Department of State (1989–1990), and general counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency (1990–1995). She began her career as a Reginald Heber Smith Fellow at Emory University School of Law, and later served as the Director, New Haven Legal Assistance Association, Inc. Later, while a cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, she argued successfully twice before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Neural-Symbolic Modeling for Natural Language Discourse

• Date: March 3, 2022
• Time: 3:00 pm ET
• Location: Cummings 601 and Zoom
• Speaker: Maria Pacheco, PhD Candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University
• Abstract: Language “in the wild” is complex and ambiguous and relies on a shared understanding of the world for its interpretation. Most current NLP methods represent language by learning word co-occurrence patterns from massive amounts of linguistic data. This representation can be very powerful, but it is insufficient to capture the meaning behind written and spoken communication. In this talk, Pacheco will motivate neural-symbolic representations for dealing with these challenges. He will introduce a holistic framework that covers all stages of the neural-symbolic pipeline: modeling, learning, inference, and its application for analyzing discourse in real-world scenarios and show its advantages with respect to end-to-end neural approaches and traditional statistical relational learning methods.
• To register: Email colloquia@cs.tufts.edu

Measuring the Fragility of Internet Access Networks

• Date: February 24, 2022
• Time: 3:00 pm ET
• Location: Cummings 601 and Zoom
• Speaker: Alexander Marder, Assistant Research Scientist, UC San Diego’s Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). 
• Abstract: On December 25, 2020, a bomb exploded in downtown Nashville, TN that exposed critical weaknesses in U.S. Internet infrastructure deployments. The explosion damaged a single network facility, but disconnected an entire Internet access network covering Nashville and Middle Tennessee. The outage revealed a single point of failure for the Nashville access network, but state of the art network measurement tools were insufficient to identify other weaknesses in access network infrastructure around the country. This talk will explore independently evaluating the resilience and security of the access network infrastructure in the U.S.
• To register: Email colloquia@cs.tufts.edu

Full-Stack Privacy: Cryptography to People and Back Again

• Date: February 28, 2022
• Time: 10:45 am ET
• Location: Cummings 601 and Zoom
• Speaker: Dr. Gabe Kaptchuk, Research Assistant Professor, Boston University’s Department of Computer Science
• Abstract: Kaptchuk will illustrate his full-stack approach by giving an overview of three of his recent works, each of which is representative of a different part of the privacy stack. He will discuss his recent work (Eurocrypt ’21) that studies the feasibility of constructing encrypted communication systems that allow for law enforcement access while being robust against abuse. In the second part, he will discuss his work (ACM CCS’21) constructing cryptographic applications that allow sensitive communication to avoid censorship using realistic steganography. Third, he will discuss his work (ACM CCS’21) studying how users understand differentially private systems when the encounter them in the wild.
• To register: Email colloquia@cs.tufts.edu

Breached! Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It

• Date: March 2, 2022 at 12:00 pm ET
• Location: 702 Cabot Intercultural Center
• Speaker: Woodrow Hartzog, Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University School of Law and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences
• Abstract: Despite the passage of many data security laws, data breaches are increasing at a record pace. The law fails because, ironically, it focuses too much on the breach itself. It pummels organizations that have suffered a breach but doesn’t address the many other actors that contribute to the problem: software companies that create vulnerable software, device companies that make insecure devices, government policymakers who write regulations that increase security risks, organizations that train people to engage in risky behaviors, and more. What is needed is a more holistic vision for data security law so that it is no longer just the law of breaches.
• To register: Email joshua.anderson@tufts.edu.

Probabilistic Commonsense Knowledge in Language

• Date: February 22, 2022
• Time: 3:00 pm ET
• Location: Cummings 601 and Zoom
• Speaker: Lorraine (Xiang Li), Ph.D. candidate, UMass Amherst
• Abstract: Commonsense knowledge is critical to achieving artificial general intelligence. This shared common background knowledge is implicit in all human communication, facilitating efficient information exchange and understanding. However, commonsense research is hampered by its immense quantity of knowledge because an explicit categorization is impossible. This talk will introduce a probabilistic model representing commonsense knowledge using a learned latent space of geometric embeddings — probabilistic box embeddings. Using box embeddings makes it possible to handle commonsense queries with intersections, unions, and negations in a way similar to Venn diagram reasoning. Li will discuss a method of retrieving commonsense related question answer distributions from human annotators and a novel method of generative evaluation.
• To register: Email colloquia@cs.tufts.edu

Civic Life Lunch – Big Brother 2.0: Privacy in the Social Media Age

• Date: February 23, 2022
• Time: 12:00 pm ET
• Location: Zoom (register to receive URL)
• Abstract: Join Tisch College in conversation on the intersection of tech, privacy and social media with Cyrus Farivar, a senior writer at Forbes who covers surveillance technology and artificial intelligence, among other topics. The conversation will be moderated by Josephine Wolff, Associate Professor of Cybersecurity Policy at the Fletcher School. She is the author of You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches, which was published by MIT Press in 2018.

Designing End-to-End Privacy-Friendly and Deployable Systems

• Date: February 17, 2022
• Time: 3:00 pm ET
• Location: Cummings 601 and Zoom
• Speaker: Wouter Lueks – Postdoctoral Researcher, EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland
• Abstract: Digital technology creates risks to people’s privacy in ways that did not exist before. I design end-to-end private systems to mitigate these real-world privacy risks. In this talk, Lueks will discuss his designs for two applications. He will analyze security, privacy, and deployment requirements; and address these requirements by designing new cryptographic primitives and system architectures.
• To register: Email colloquia@cs.tufts.edu

Building Systems That Protect Users and Their Data

• Date: February 10, 2022
• Time: 3:00 pm ET
• Location: Cummings 601 and Zoom
• Speaker: Johes Bater – Postdoctoral Researcher, Database Group at Duke University
• Abstract: Data breaches, where organizations compromise sensitive user data, are frighteningly common. Current approaches however, fail to properly safeguard security and privacy. Existing encrypted databases introduce data pipelines that leak enough side channel information that data breaches are an inevitability, while cryptographically secure solutions are so slow and cumbersome that they no longer serve their intended purpose. Moreover, many business models – such as targeted advertising – are predicated on their continued ability to analyze and make decisions based on private user data. Without a principled approach to protecting user privacy, it is unclear if this setup is sustainable. To address this problem, we need systems that treat security and privacy as first-class citizens in their system design.
• To register: Email colloquia@cs.tufts.edu

Translating AI to Impact: Uncertainty and Human-agent Interactions in Multi-agent Systems for Public Health and Conservation

• Date: February 8, 2022
• Time: 3:00 pm ET
• Location: Zoom
• Speaker: Elizabeth Bondi, Ph.D candidate, Computer Science, Harvard University 
• Abstract: AI is now being applied widely in society, including to support decision-making in important, resource-constrained efforts in conservation and public health. Such real-world use cases introduce new challenges, like noisy, limited data and human-in-the- loop decision-making. The speaker will show that ignoring these challenges can lead to suboptimal results in AI for social impact systems. 

The Geopolitics Behind Data Routing

• Date: February 9, 2022
• Time: 12:00 pm ET
• Location: Zoom
• Speaker: Frédérick Douzet, Professor of Geopolitics at the University of Paris 8, Director of the French Institute of Geopolitics Research Team (IFG Lab) and Director of the Center Geopolitics of the Datasphere (GEODE)
• Abstract: In January 2022, Kazakhstan totally shut down its Internet as political unrest escalated across the country. This incident is not isolated. In November 2019, in the wake of severely suppressed political demonstrations against the regime, Iran managed to cut off most traffic from the global Internet, while still fully operating its own domestic network. Within the course of 24 hours, the regime was able to selectively block access to the outside Internet for most users, except for a small portion of traffic vital to its economy such as banking data. These initiatives reflect new ways in which states think strategically about cyberspace and leverage the architecture of data routing as a tool of geopolitical control. The analysis of the topography (physical infrastructures) and topology (BGP data) of the network helps infer, document and characterize these strategies.

Cybersecurity & Public Policy Seminar: "The Role of Internet Standards in Public Policy: Emerging from the Shadows?" with Alissa Cooper

• Date: November 17, 2021
• Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm ET
• Location: 702 Cabot
• Speaker: Alissa Cooper, Vice President of Technology Standards and Fellow at Cisco Systems
• Abstract: The foundation of the global Internet consists of standardized communications protocols that allow billions of users and devices to connect and communicate with each other. Although the organizations developing these standards are highly technical, they play an often unseen role in influencing and being influenced by public policy debates related to security, privacy, sovereignty, geopolitics, and more. This talk will explore the rich history and current trends at the intersection of technical standards and public policy, focusing on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the premier global Internet standards organization. The talk will unpack what is behind recent policymaker interest in technical standards at the IETF and elsewhere and what it may mean for the future. 

Panel on Careers in Cybersecurity Policy

• Date: October 13, 2021
• Time: 12:00pm-2:00pm ET
• Location: 745A Dowling
• Panelists: Hina Gir – Manager at Deloitte, Cyber & Strategic Risk; Monica M. Ruiz – Program Manager/ Digital Diplomacy Strategist at Microsoft; Andy Sayler – Security Engineer at Twitter

Hina M. Gir is a Manager in Cyber and Strategic Risk at Deloitte, currently serving clients at the Department of Homeland Security. Prior to joining Deloitte in Fall 2018, Hina served in severalpositions across the U.S. Government, including the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and at the National Security Council at the White House. Hina departed the National Security Council in 2018, as the Senior Advisor for International Economic Affairs. Prior to becoming the Senior Advisor, Hina was Special Assistant to National Security Advisor, General H.R. McMaster. And before joining the West Wing of the White House, she was the Special Assistant for cybersecurity policy at the National Security Council for 14 months and transitioned from the Obama administration to the Trump administration in this role.

Monica M. Ruiz is a Program Manager in Microsoft’s Digital Diplomacy team. In this role she focuses on efforts to promote stability in cyberspace and advance trust, security and human rights in this domain. Prior to joining Microsoft, Monica was the Program Fellow for the Cyber Initiative and Special Projects at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Earlier in her career, she was the first recipient of the U.S. Boren Fellowship to travel to Estonia where her research focused on cybersecurity policy and strategy. Born in Ecuador and raised in Miami, she holds a bachelor’s degree from Florida International University and a master’s degree from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. 

Andy Salyer is a Staff Security Engineer on Twitter’s Information Security Team. He specializes in systems and infrastructure security, including issues related to regional risk, security policy, and identity and access management. Prior to joining Twitter, he completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Colorado, including a fellowship working as a policy technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC. He holds a BSEE from Tufts University and sits on the Silicon Flatirons Advisory Board where he deals with policy issues related to security and privacy.

Cybersecurity & Public Policy Seminar: “Reimagining Social Media” with Ethan Zuckerman

• Date: September 29, 2021
• Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm ET
• Location: 702 Cabot
• Co-Sponsor: Hitachi Center for Technology and International Affairs
• Speaker: Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Information and Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Director, Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
• Abstract: The power of social media to affect politics, social change and even to provoke violence has become increasingly clear in the last few years. As we consider the power of social media and its many problems, many are proposing regulations of online speech by governments or demanding platforms take more responsibility for speech they host. This talk explores a different alternative: what if, instead of fixing existing social media platforms, we imagined and built social media designed to help us become better friends, neighbors and citizens? While such a project sounds impossibly idealistic, it’s well underway, and may change the social media landscape more quickly than we would expect.

Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Collide: The Colonial Pipeline Attack

• Info: Prof. Susan Landau joined Prof. Amy Myers Jaffe and Prof. Kelly Sims Gallagher for a discussion about the DarkSide ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline
• Date: Thursday, May 20 at 2:30pm – 3:30pm ET
• Video: Watch the recording

2021 Student Symposium in Cybersecurity Policy

• Date: April 16, 2021
• Location: Virtual
• Keynote Speaker: Ian Levy, Technical Director at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), U.K

Understanding the Security Challenges that Journalists Face: A Conversation with Runa Sandvik

• Date and Time: Wed March 31, 2021, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
• Speaker: Runa Sandvik, Former Senior Director of Information Security, New York Times

People Count: Contact-Tracing Apps and Public Health / Book talk with Susan Landau

Can we repurpose the tracking technology that we carry with us—devices with GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and social media connectivity—to serve public health in a pandemic? In People Count, Susan Landau looks at some of the apps developed for contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that issues of effectiveness and equity intersect.

• Date: Friday, March 19, 2021
• Time: 8:00 am-9:00 am

A Conversation with Pedro Pavon, Facebook

• Date and Time: Wed March 10, 2021, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
• Speaker: Pedro Pavon, Director of Privacy, Civil Rights, and Ads, Facebook

Algorithmic Bias: A Local Human Rights Perspective: A Conversation with Brittny Saunders

• Date and Time: Wed February 10, 2021, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
• Speaker: Brittny Saunders, Deputy Commissioner for Strategic Initiatives at the New York City Commission on Human Rights

Making Decisions About Cyber Risk

• Date and Time: December 2, 2:00 pm ET
• Location: Zoom
• Speaker: Andy Ellis, Chief Security Officer, Akamai
• RSVP: To register, please email joshua.anderson@tufts.edu. You will receive a Zoom link and password.

Panel on Careers in Cybersecurity Policy

Join the Cybersecurity & Public Policy Program for a career panel featuring three guest speakers on Wednesday, October 14, 2020, 12:00 – 2:00pm ET. Panelists include: 

• Alan Davidson, VP of Global Policy, Trust and Security | Mozilla
• John B. Morris Jr, Nonresident Senior Fellow – Governance Studies, Center for Technology Innovation | Brookings Institution
• Malorie Knodel, Chief Technology Officer | Center for Democracy and Technology

A Discussion with Kilnam Chon: Developing the Internet in Asia

• Date: Friday September 25, 9 am-10:30 am ET.
• Location: Zoom

2020 Student Symposium in Cybersecurity Policy

• Date: March 5 & 6, 2020
• Location: Ballou Hall, Coolidge Room
• Keynote Speaker: Avril Haines, Deputy Director of Columbia World Projects, a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

A Conversation on Cryptography with Jim Baker & Susan Landau

Jim Baker is the Director of National Security and Cybersecurity at the R Street Institute, a CNN legal analyst and a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. He is also the former general counsel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (The views expressed in this talk are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his current or former employers.)

• Moderator: Josephine Wolff
• Date: February 12, 2020
• Time: 5:30 pm-7:00 pm
• Attendance Policy: Open to the Public
• Location: 205 Cabot Intercultural Center

Elections and Public Confidence: Getting It Right

• Date & Time: Nov 20, 2019, 12:30 pm
• Speaker: Josh Benaloh, Senior Cryptographer, Microsoft Research
• Location: 205 Cabot Intercultural Center

How Safe is the Cloud? An Industry-Expert Panel on Cybersecurity & Cloud Services

• Date & Time: November 7, 2019, 7:00 pm (followed by Networking Reception at 8:00 pm)
• Speakers: David Allen, Vice President, Operations & Strategy at Oracle; Ming Chow, Associate Teaching Professor, Computer Science at Tufts University; Hayley Cohen, Gamification Engineer & Executive Security Advisor for X-Force Command at IBM Security; John Steven, Chief Technology Officer at ZeroNorth; Moderated by Scott Hilton, Lecturer at Tufts Gordon Institute
• Location: Tufts University Science and Engineering Complex, 200 College Ave, Medford, MA 02155

For Sale: One Snake. Good Oil Producer — No Longer Required.

• Date & Time: October 30, 2019, 12:30 pm
• Speaker: Ian Levy, Technical Director, NCSC
• Location: 205 Cabot Intercultural Center

Disinformation in the Digital Age: A Talk with Gill Bennett OBE, Former Chief Historian, British Foreign Commonwealth Office

• Date and Time: Thursday, October 17th, 12:00pm
• Speaker: Gill Bennett OBE, former Chief Historian of the British Foreign Commonwealth Office
• Location: 702 Cabot Intercultural Center

Cybersecurity Policy Career Panel

• Date & Time: Oct 16, 2019, 12:30 pm – 3:00 pm
• Speakers Lauren Van Wazer – Vice President, Global Public Policy, Akamai Technologies; Maurice Turner – Senior Technologist, Center for Democracy and Technology; Taylor Reynolds – Technology Policy Director, Internet Policy Research Initiative, MIT
• Location: 205 Cabot Intercultural Center

Cyber Institutions and Sub-Optimal Logic of Cyber Deterrence

• Date & Time: Oct 2, 2019, 12:30 pm
• Speaker: Nadiya Kostyuk, Predoctoral Fellow, Tufts University Cybersecurity Policy Program
• Location: 205 Cabot Intercultural Center

U.S. Strategy and Doctrine for Cyber Conflict and Deterrence

• Date & Time: September 18, 2019, 12:30 pm
• Speaker: Herb Lin, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security, Hoover Institution.
• Location: 205 Cabot Intercultural Center