“The Road Not Taken: Towards Proactive Research on Internet Censorship”
Location: 503 Conference room, 177 Huntington Ave.
Abstract: Internet censorship is a significant threat to the freedom of speech and open access to information across the world. While there exists an arsenal of tools to circumvent Internet censorship, they fall short in helping censored users effectively and reliably. I argue that a fundamental reason for such inefficacy of circumvention tools is their reactive development process: circumvention developers adjust their tools based on the actions taken by the censors, which gives the censors the upper-hand in this arms-race. In this talk, I will argue for a proactive approach for research on censorship circumvention and I will present some of our ongoing research efforts towards this.
Bio: Amir Houmansadr is an Associate Professor of computer science at UMass Amherst. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. Amir is broadly interested in the security and privacy of networked/AI systems. To that end, he designs and deploys privacy-enhancing technologies, analyzes network protocols and services (e.g., messaging apps and machine learning APIs) for privacy leakage, and performs theoretical analysis to derive bounds on privacy (e.g., using game theory and information theory). Amir has received several awards including the 2013 IEEE S&P Best Practical Paper Award, a 2015 Google Faculty Research Award, a 2016 NSF CAREER Award, a 2022 DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the 2023 Best Practical Paper Award from the FOCI Community, the first place at CSAW 2023 Applied Research Competition, a Distinguished Paper Award from ACM CCS 2023, a 2024 Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP), and a 2024 DARPA Directors Award.
Faculty Host: Alina Oprea