Paul Laskowski
    Research     CV     Photos     Contact

I am an adjunct assistant professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. My research interests span network architecture, digital privacy, and information economics. I am especially interested in the way that modern techniques for collecting and analyzing personal information affect the balance of power between citizens, governments, and corporations, and in algorithmic mechanisms that can safeguard sensitive data. My work draws on a variety of techniques from economics, statistics, and the analysis of algorithms.

At the School of Information, I contribute to the Master of Information and Data Science, an online degree program geared towards working professionals. I have designed 4 courses for the online setting, taught students in synchronous sessions, and contributed to committees on curriculum development and admissions.

I completed my dissertation at Berkeley on the topic of innovation in the internet architecture. My disseration was supervised by John Chuang, Hal Varian, and Scott ShenkerPamela Samuelson, Suzanne Scotchmer, and Deirdre Mulligan also served as my committee members and advisors.

Before coming to Berkeley, I was lead developer for Project INDIGO, which stands for Information Diffusion and Growth.  This project was started by Marshall Van Alstyne of the University of Michigan's School of Information as a tool for the development and communication of information models.  In the last years, the tool has grown into a general development environment for agent-based simulations.


N. Kohli and P. Laskowski. Differential Privacy for Black-Box Statistical Analyses. Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP), 2021 [pdf]

J. Kroll, N. Kohli, and P. Laskowski. Privacy and policy in polystores: a data management research agenda. Heterogeneous Data Management, Polystores, and Analytics for Healthcare. Springer, Cham, 2019. 68-81. [pdf]

Kohli, Nitin, and Paul Laskowski. Epsilon Voting: Mechanism Design for Parameter Selection in Differential Privacy. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Privacy-Aware Computing (PAC), pp. 19-30. 2018. [pdf]

B. Johnson, P. Laskowski. Privacy, Polarization, and Passage of Divisive Laws. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Privacy Aware Computing (PAC). 2018. [pdf]

P. Laskowski, S. Karayev, and M. Hearst. How Do Professors Format Exams? An Analysis of Question Variety at Scale. Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale. 2018. [pdf]

M.A. Hearst, P. Laskowski, and L. Silva, Evaluating Information Visualization via the Interplay of Heuristic Evaluation and Question-Based Scoring. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). May 2016. [pdf]

B. Johnson, P. Laskowski, T. Maillart, J. Chuang, and N. Christin. Caviar and Yachts: How your Purchase Data May come back to Haunt You. In Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Economics of Information Security (WEIS). Delft, Netherlands. June 2015. [pdf]

P. Laskowski, B. Johnson, T. Maillart, and J. Chuang. Government Surveillance and Incentives to Abuse Power. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Economics of Information Security (WEIS). State College, PA. June 2014. [pdf]

P. Laskowski, P. Ferreira. Analyzing the Graph Structure of Supply Chains. 2011 working paper. [pdf]

P. Laskowski, J. Chuang. The Economics of Virtualized Networks. 2011 working paper.

P. Laskowski, P. Ferreira. A General Supply Chain Framework with Application to the Network Neutrality Debate. Industry Studies Association Conference, May 2013. (Abstract reviewed)

P. Laskowski, J. Chuang. Innovations and Upgrades in Virtualized Network Architectures. In Proceedings of NetEcon, October 2010. [pdf]

P. Laskowski, J. Chuang. A Leap of Faith? From Large-Scale Testbed to the Global Internet. 37th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, September 2009. (Abstract reviewed) [pdf]

P. Laskowski, J. Ubois, D. Marvit, J. Chuang. Discovering Digital Content in the Age of Peer-to-Peer. In Proceedings of NetEcon, July 2009. [pdf]

P. Laskowski, J. Chuang. Empowering Users to Break the Internet Impasse. Workshop on the Economics of Securing the Information Infrastructure, 2009. (By invitation)

P. Laskowski, B. Johnson, J. Chuang.  User-Directed Routing: From Theory, Towards Practice.  In Proceedings of NetEcon, August 2008. [pdf]

P. Laskowski, J. Chuang.  Network Monitors and Contracting Systems: Competition and Innovation.  In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, September 2006. [pdf]

P. Laskowski, J. Chuang.  Antitrust Scrutiny of Price-Fixing Clauses in Patent Licenses.  2005 working paper. [pdf]

P. Dollar, P. Laskowski, and M. Van Alstyne.  Simulating Information Growth and Diffusion in Agent Societies.   In Proceedings of the Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems Conference, 2002, Carnegie Mellon University, Day 2, pp. 97-103.