Notables

News in brief

July 2024

Iqbal paper named runner-up for the Caspar Bowden Award
The award honors papers in privacy-enhancing technologies field

A research paper by Umar Iqbal, assistant professor of computer science & engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named runner-up for the Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

The award is presented annually to researchers who have made an outstanding contribution to the theory, design, implementation or deployment of privacy enhancing technologies. It is awarded at the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS).

Iqbal’s paper, “Tracking, profiling, and ad targeting in the Amazon smart speaker ecosystem,” was first presented at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Montreal in October 2023, where it received the best paper award. The paper provided insight into what information is captured by smart speakers, how it is shared with other parties, and how it is used by such parties, allowing consumers to better understand the privacy risks of these devices and the impact of data sharing on people's online experiences.

After the release of this research, Amazon updated its disclosure to include that it uses smart speaker interaction data to infer user interests for the purposes of ad targeting, which was initially not disclosed. 

May 2024

Habib Chamoun, an adjunct instructor in the Henry Edwin Sever Institute in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St Louis, and Francisco Rabadán Pérez of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid will present two collaborative research projects at the International Congress on Big Data and Mathematics at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Faculty of Economics and Business, in Madrid May 30 and 31. The first project is a study on teaching innovation in collaboration with Maria Victoria Ramirez from Université Catholique de l’Ouest Angers France on students at risk and engaged students. The second study is an anthropological study on the reasons for of the Lebanese Profile in the diaspora. 

April 2024

Chenyang Lu, the Fullgraf Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, is giving a keynote speech on AI for health at the CPS-IoT Week May 13-16 in Hong Kong. Lu, who is the director of the AI for Health Institute, will speak about the potential to support precision medicine using wearables that allow unobtrusive monitoring of patients in their daily lives and will share results of three clinical studies using wearables. This follows his recent participation in panel discussion with alumni to discuss the applications and future of the intersections of AI in healthcare at an event hosted by the WashU Healthcare Network in New York.