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Feb 3, 2016

CLTC Announces Inaugural Research Grants

More than $900,000 in funding will be shared among 22 research teams working at UC Berkeley and beyond

How can organizations better detect spear-phishing cyberattacks? Could neural signals be used as a method of online authentication? How effective are tactics such as financial account closures and asset seizures in deterring cyber criminals? What types of defenses could help protect at-risk activists and NGOs from state-level surveillance?

These are just a few of the questions that will be considered by researchers funded by the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC), which has announced it will allocate more than $900,000 across 22 teams of researchers to support work to be carried out in the 2016 calendar year.

“It’s an honor for us to be in a position to help Berkeley researchers advance and extend their cybersecurity work,” says Professor Steve Weber, faculty director of the CLTC. “The breadth and ambition of the research projects is stunning. The scope of the work shows some of the ways in which the cybersecurity agenda is evolving.”

The grants are the first to be awarded by the CLTC, which was established in 2015 through generous funding from the Hewlett Foundation. Housed in the School of Information, the CLTC serves as a hub for industry, academia, policy, and practitioners, with research and programs focused on a future-oriented conceptualization of cybersecurity — what it could mean for human beings, machines, and the societies that depend on both.

Winning grant proposals were chosen from 50 submitted proposals through a selection process that began in Fall 2015. All of the grant recipients are UC Berkeley-affiliated researchers, though some projects have partnerships with external institutions, including the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and Carnegie Mellon University. Three of the projects were jointly funded with the UC Berkeley Center for Technology, Society & Policy, a multi-disciplinary research center focused on emergent social and policy issues related to technology.

Research Grant Recipients

For a full list of the inaugural list of grantees and descriptions of their projects, see the announcement on the CLTC website.

Cybercrime Science: Understanding Cybercriminal Networks and the Effect of Disruption
Sadia Afroz, Research Scientist, International Computer Science Institute

The Internet’s Challenge to the State
Vinod K. Aggarwal, Professor, Department of Political Science, and Director, Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Study Center

Trust, Community, and the Production of Cybersecurity Professionals
Coye Cheshire, Professor, School of Information; Ashwin J. Mathew, Visiting Scholar, School of Information, and Internet Infrastructure Researcher, Packet Clearing House

Security and Privacy of Biosensing at Scale
John Chuang, Professor, School of Information; Tapan Parikh, Professor, School of Information

Cybersecurity and Corporate Governance
Steven Davidoff Solomon, Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy

Unpacking Cybersecurity “Information Sharing” for an Uncertain Future
Jim Dempsey, Executive Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology; Elaine Sedenberg, Ph.D. candidate, School of Information

The Security Behavior Observatory
Serge Egelman, Senior Researcher, International Computer Science Institute

Using Individual Differences to Tailor Security Mitigations
Serge Egelman, Senior Researcher, International Computer Science Institute

Robust Access in Hostile Networks
David Fifield, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences; Doug Tygar, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and School of Information; Xiao Qiang, Adjunct Professor, School of Information

Secure Machine Learning for Adversarial Environments
Anthony Joseph, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences; Doug Tygar, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and School of Information

Privacy, Disclosure, and Social Exchange Theory
Jennifer King, Ph.D. candidate, School of Information

(Im)balances of Power in the Age of Personal Data
Paul Laskowski, Assistant Adjunct Professor, Berkeley School of Information

Constructing Intermediary Policies to Effectively Deter Financially-Motivated Cyber Criminals
Damon McCoy, Staff Researcher, International Computer Science Institute

Cybersecurity: Meaning and Practice
Deirdre Mulligan, Associate Professor, School of Information

Social Media Data and Cybersecurity
Galen Panger, Ph.D. candidate, School of Information

Illuminating and Defending Against Targeted Government Surveillance of Activists
Vern Paxson, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and Director, Networking and Security Group, International Computer Science Institute

Corrigibility in Artificial Intelligence Systems
Stuart Russell, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Blazar: Secure and Practical Program Hardening
Dawn Song, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Defense Against Social Engineering Attacks
David Wagner, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences; Vern Paxson, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and Director, Networking and Security Group, International Computer Science Institute

Jointly Funded with the Center for Technology, Society & Policy

A User-Centered Perspective on Algorithmic Decision-Making
Emily Paul, G.S. Hans, Pavel Vanegas, Rena Coen

The Value of Respect: Reclaiming the Philosophical and Political Foundations of Informed Consent for the Era of Big “Things”
Anna Lauren Hoffmann, Elaine Sedenberg

Operationalizing Privacy for Open Data Initiatives: A Guide for Cities
Nathan Malkin, Sona Makker

Last updated:

October 4, 2016