The SPARTA Lab is currently looking for self-motivated students seeking a Ph.D. in Computer Science and interested in pursuing research in topics related to computational social science, online privacy, and Internet measurement. Send an email to "rishab[-]nithyanand[at]uiowa[dot]edu" with the subject "you NEED to hire me!" if you're interested in working with us and have a demonstrably strong background in any of the following areas: computer networking, statistics, text analytics, or experiment design.
The Security, Privacy, and Anonymity Research Team at UIowa is a group of researchers who enjoy working towards improving security, privacy, anonymity, and transparency. Beyond technical solutions, we are also interested in achieving a better understanding of the underlying economic, social, legal, and ethical issues which make security, privacy, anonymity, and transparency challenging to achieve. We are part of the Department of Computer Science at The University of Iowa.
Current Researchers
Faculty
Ph.D. students
M.Sc. students
B.Sc. students
Research Themes
Advertising & Tracking
We perform measurements and analysis to uncover how your data is shared between different entities in the online advertising and tracking ecosystem.
IPv6 Censorship
We study how nations around the world are deploying information controls mechanisms on the IPv6 Internet. We use this knowledge to improve the state-of-the-art in censorship circumvention mechanisms and tools.
Platform Auditing
We conduct large-scale audits of online platforms to understand how they impact their users.
Next-generation Networking
We conduct measurements to improve our understanding of next-generation networking protocols such as IPv6, MultiPath TCP, and satellite communication.
Online Radicalization
We identify the different ways in which the Internet can be used to radicalize vulnerable individuals and design intervention techniques to prevent online radicalization.
Blog updates
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March 03, 2022
Can proactive interventions help moderate Reddit's communities?
In this blog post, Hussam Habib provides an overview of our work to understand whether dangerous online communities can be identified by their evolutionary characteristics. Read more about the work here.
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August 01, 2020
ICANN's gTLD experiments: Expansion or extortion?
This blog post motivates our recently published PAM 2020 paper which seeks to understand the cost of ICANNs gTLD expansion on major brands and their copyrights.
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February 03, 2020
Apophanies or Epiphanies?
We recently received notification that our work was accepted for publication at The Web Conference (WWW 2020). In this post, we provide a short summary of the work.
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