Author: tristan

Summer School on Experimental Methodology in Computational Science Research

The purpose of this summer school is to bring together interested computer scientists and other researchers who work in the broadly-defined area of “computational science”, and to explore the state-of-the-art in methods and tools for enabling reproducible and “recomputable” research. Reproducibility is crucial to the scientific process; without it researchers cannot build on findings, or even verify these findings. The development and emergence of new tools, hardware and processing platforms means that reproducibility should be easier than ever before. But to do so, we also need to effect “a culture change that will integrate computational reproducibility into the research process”.

The school will be hands on, comprising lectures, tutorials and practical sessions in topics including statistical methods, using cloud computing services for conducting and sharing reproducible experiments, methods for publishing code and data, legal issues surrounding the publication and sharing of code and data, and generally the design of experiments with replication in mind. Speakers include academics from mathematics, computer science and law schools, and other researchers and industrial speakers from Figshare, Microsoft Azure, the Software Sustainability Institute and more. Practicals will include the replication of existing experiments and a “hackathon” to improve tools for replication. The aim of the school will be to create a report that will be published in arXiv by the end of the week, and in a suitable journal later on.

For more information and to register please visit our web site at http://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/emcsr2014/.

Event details

  • When: 4th August 2014 09:00 - 8th August 2014 17:00
  • Format: Summer School

Soundcomber: A Stealthy and Context-Aware Sound Trojan for Smartphones

Seminar by Dr Apu Kapadia, Indiana University

We introduce Soundcomber, a “sensory malware” for smartphones that
uses the microphone to steal private information from phone
conversations. Soundcomber is lightweight and stealthy. It uses
targeted profiles to locally analyze portions of speech likely to
contain information such as credit card numbers. It evades known
defenses by transferring small amounts of private data to the malware
server utilizing smartphone-specific covert channels. Additionally, we
present a general defensive architecture that prevents such sensory
malware attacks.

Event details

  • When: 9th August 2012 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Format: Seminar

Mobile user study masterclass

SICSA Masterclass
Mobile user studies and experience sampling

Dr Apu Kapadia is a Distinguished SICSA Visitor in August 2012. As
part of his visit we are organising a pair of masterclasses in running
mobile user studies. These masterclasses are open to all SICSA PhD
students. Students will be need to be available to attend both
masterclasses:
– Thursday 2 August, University of Glasgow
– Thursday 9 August, University of St Andrews

The classes will cover how to design and run a mobile user study using
smartphones, and in particularly cover the use of the experience
sampling method (ESM), a currently popular methodology for collecting
rich data from real-world participants. In the first class, attendees
will learn about the methodology and be given a smartphone. Attendees
will then carry the smartphone and participate in a small study, and
we will cover data analysis in the second class in St Andrews. The
organisers have experience in running ESM studies which have looked at
mobility, social networking, security and privacy, but the methodology
should be of interest to PhD students in both the NGI and MMI themes.

Biography of Dr Apu Kapadia:

Apu Kapadia is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and
Informatics at the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana
University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 2005.

Dr Kapadia has published over thirty peer-reviewed conference papers
and journal articles focused on privacy, with several of these at
top-tier venues such as ACM TISSEC, IEEE TDSC, PMC, CCS, NDSS,
Pervasive, and SOUPS. For his work on accountable anonymity, two of
his papers were named as “Runners-up for PET Award 2009: Outstanding
Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies”, a prestigious award in
the privacy community. His work on usable metaphors for controlling
privacy was given the “Honorable Mention Award (Runner-up for Best
Paper)” at Pervasive. Dr Kapadia’s recent work on smartphone
“sensory” malware that make use of onboard sensors was published at
NDSS and received widespread media coverage. His work on analyzing
privacy leaks on Twitter also received media attention naming his work
as one of the “7 Must-Read Twitter Studies from 2011”, and one of “The
10 Most Interesting Social Media Studies of 2011”.

Dr Kapadia is interested in topics related to systems’ security and
privacy. He is particularly interested in security and privacy issues
related to mobile sensing, privacy-enhancing technologies to
facilitate anonymous access to services with some degree of
accountability, usable mechanisms to improve security and privacy, and
security in decentralized and mobile environments.

Event details

  • When: 9th August 2012 11:00 - 17:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33