The UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) is proud to announce the recipients of our 2021 research grants. In total, 14 different student-led research groups have been awarded grants to support initiatives related to digital security issues emerging at the intersection of technology and society. 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 of technology.
We are also pleased to announce that we have awarded two UC Berkeley graduate students the 2021 Cal Cybersecurity Research Fellowship: Tanu Kaushik, a student in the School of Information’s Master of Information and Cybersecurity (MICS) program, and Ji Su Yoo, a UC Berkeley PhD student in the School of Information. This fellowship will support Kaushik’s research on threats posed by adversarial machine learning and detection, protection, response, and recovery mechanisms for known attack techniques; and will support Yoo’s work, which looks at misinformation corrections, specifically how the message and identity of the messenger impact various social groups’ reception of misinformation corrections. The Cal Cybersecurity Research Fellowship is made possible by a generous gift from an anonymous donor.
As the events of 2020 have shown us, the effort to improve digital security in the public interest is only increasing in importance. Many of the funded projects are already yielding important results, including research on privacy controls for always-listening devices and on organizations’ vulnerability management and remediation processes. New initiatives to be funded include studies on the cybertalent pipeline, the usability of privacy and security controls on smartphone devices, advancing machine learning defenses against adversarial attacks, and more.
“CLTC is delighted to be able to support UC Berkeley researchers working at the forefront of cybersecurity for the sixth year in a row,” says Ann Cleaveland, Executive Director of CLTC. “These students have continued to advance groundbreaking work in the face of the extraordinary challenges of the past year. The research being done by our grantees is crucial for informing changes in the world of cybersecurity behaviors, technologies, policies, markets, and beyond. Congratulations to our 2021 grantees.”
Visit this page for summaries of CLTC’s 2021 grantees, or check out our 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 grantees.
