FYI, talk maybe of interest to graph mining folks!
- Aditya
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [Bburg-fac] CS Graduate Seminar Announcement
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 11:22:30 -0400
From: Denis Gracanin via Bburg-fac <bburg-fac(a)cs.vt.edu>
Reply-To: Denis Gracanin <gracanin(a)vt.edu>
To: gradstudents(a)cs.vt.edu <gradstudents(a)cs.vt.edu>, VT.CS Blacksburg
Faculty Mailing List <bburg-fac(a)cs.vt.edu>
Hello All,
The first CS Graduate Seminar Talk in Fall 2016 semester will be held this Friday, 2 September 2016, 11:15am - 12:30pm in Hancock Hall (flyer attached). Please note the location change this semester (Hancock Hall 100).
Thanks,
Denis
Speaker: Gang Wang, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech
Title: Human Factors in the Security of Online and Mobile Systems
Abstract:
Human factors are playing an increasingly important role in the security of today’s online and mobile systems. The successful operation of large systems like online social networks and location-based services relies on well-behaved users contributing high-quality user content. An improved understanding of user behavior is instrumental to differentiate real legitimate users from malicious ones, and understanding misbehavior and attacks in such systems.
In this talk, I will describe our efforts to improve security by characterizing and modeling complex human behaviors. First, I will start by describing the fundamental challenge of authenticating real users and real mobile phones in online and mobile systems. We reveal an emerging threat of "Sybil devices" where an attacker can control a large army of simulated devices pretending to be real users to lunch practical attacks such as location tracking and data pollution in mobile services. Second, as a practical solution, I will describe a clickstream analysis system to model and understand human behavior and identify fake (simulated) users. We build highly "interpretable" behavior models, which help us to characterize user behavior at multiple levels of granularity and track their behavioral changes over time. Finally, I conclude the talk by highlighting my future plans on using data-driven approaches to building human-centric security systems.
Bio:
Gang Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. His research interests cover a range of topics in Security, Data Mining, Mobile Networks, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). His goals work towards gaining a deep understanding of user behavior and its roles in attacks and defenses to better secure Internet systems. Gang’s current projects focus on three areas: security and privacy in online communities, data-driven models of user behavior, security of mobile and wearable devices. Gang obtained his PhD in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara (2016). He earned a BE degree from Tsinghua University (2010). He spent two summers at Microsoft Research Redmond in 2011 and 2014. He was the recipient of Outstanding Dissertation Award (2016) and PhD Dissertation Fellowship (2015) from UCSB, and Best Practical Paper Award from ACM SIGMETRICS (2013).
