Tag: Research
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Meet the Researcher: Jane Castleman
Jane Castleman is a Master’s student in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Castleman’s research centers around the fairness, transparency, and privacy of algorithmic systems, particularly in the context of generative AI and online platforms. She recently sat down with Princeton undergraduate Jason Persaud ‘27 to discuss her research interests and gave some…
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Why the GenAI Infrastructure Boom May Break Historical Patterns
Authored by Mihir Kshirsagar Observers invoke railroad, electricity, and telecom precedents when contextualizing the current generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) infrastructure boom—usually to debate whether or when we are heading for a crash. But these discussions miss an important pattern that held across all three prior cycles: when the bubbles burst, investors lost money but society…
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Meet the Researcher: Varun Satish
Varun Satish is a Ph.D. student in demography at Princeton University. His current projects include using language models to study the life course, and using machine learning to uncover shifting perceptions of social class in the United States over the last 50 years. Satish is originally from Western Sydney, Australia. Princeton undergraduate Jason Persaud ‘27…
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A Multi-pronged Strategy for Securing Internet Routing
By Henry Birge-Lee, Nick Feamster, Mihir Kshirsagar, Prateek Mittal, Jennifer Rexford The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is conducting an inquiry into how it can help protect against security vulnerabilities in the internet routing infrastructure. A number of large communication companies have weighed in on the approach the FCC should take. CITP’s Tech Policy Clinic convened…
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How to constructively review a research paper
Any piece of research can be evaluated on three axes: Correctness/validity — are the claims justified by evidence? Impact/significance — how will the findings affect the research field (and the world)? Novelty/originality — how big a leap are the ideas, especially the methods, compared to what was already known? There are additional considerations such as…
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Facebook's Emotional Manipulation Study: When Ethical Worlds Collide
The research community is buzzing about the ethics of Facebook’s now-famous experiment in which it manipulated the emotional content of users’ news feeds to see how that would affect users’ activity on the site. (The paper, by Adam Kramer of Facebook, Jamie Guillory of UCSF, and Jeffrey Hancock of Cornell, appeared in Proceedings of the…
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How the DMCA Chills Research
I have a new piece in Slate, on how the DMCA chills security research. In the piece, I tell three stories of DMCA threats against Alex Halderman and me, and talk about how Congress can fix the problem. “The Chilling Effects of the DMCA: The outdated copyright law doesn’t just hurt consumers—it cripples researchers.” “These…
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Making Excuses for Fees on Electronic Public Records
I wrote a letter to Judge Hogan, the recently appointed Director of the Administrative Office of the US Courts. I wanted to make the case directly to him that the courts should do the right thing — and that what they are doing right now is against the law. I was assured by his colleagues…
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Anticensorship in the Internet's Infrastructure
I’m pleased to announce a research result that Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and I have been working on for the past 18 months: Telex, a new approach to circumventing state-level Internet censorship. Telex is markedly different from past anticensorship efforts, and we believe it has the potential to shift the balance of power…
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"You Might Also Like:" Privacy Risks of Collaborative Filtering
Ann Kilzer, Arvind Narayanan, Ed Felten, Vitaly Shmatikov, and I have released a new research paper detailing the privacy risks posed by collaborative filtering recommender systems. To examine the risk, we use public data available from Hunch, LibraryThing, Last.fm, and Amazon in addition to evaluating a synthetic system using data from the Netflix Prize dataset.…