News / July 2021

CLTC Welcomes Summer 2021 Research Cohort

The Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity is thrilled to welcome a new cohort of researchers for Summer 2021. This multi-disciplinary group of researchers brings additional capacity to CLTC’s original and future-focused cybersecurity research, advancing our mission to help decision-makers act on foresight and expand who gets to participate in — and has access to — cybersecurity. Please help us welcome this talented cohort to CLTC! Read on to learn more about these researchers and their respective projects.

Andrew Reddie, Interim Research Director

Dr. Andrew Reddie will serve as CLTC’s Interim Research Director, leading several of CLTC’s research collaborations, advising on our research agenda, and working with our summer graduate student researchers (GSRs) and fellows. Andrew brings extensive research experience to CLTC, including projects related to cybersecurity, wargaming, arms control, and emerging technologies.

Reddie is a postdoctoral research fellow at UC Berkeley and senior engineer at Sandia National Laboratories. His recent work has focused on the design of multilateral arms control agreements to address both emerging military capabilities and the sunset of the New START regime in 2026.

Andrew is currently a Bridging the Gap New Era fellow, Hans J. Morgenthau fellow at Notre Dame University, a non-resident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center at Marine Corps University, and project director at the Berkeley APEC Study Center. Previously, Andrew served as deputy director of the Nuclear Policy Working Group and as an associate at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC.

 

Sophia Baik, Postdoctoral Scholar

Sophia Baik is a doctoral candidate at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication, where her research looks at the politics of identity and social justice in the current networked communication environment, focusing on issues of privacy and surveillance. As a postdoctoral scholar at CLTC, Sophia will examine how companies, customers, citizens, and other relevant stakeholders have reacted to and been impacted by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA).

She will explore a variety of dynamics related to how organizations have adapted to these privacy laws, including changes in their organizational structures. technical design and development practices. business practices, forms of stakeholder engagement, and social norms and behaviors. She will also focus on critically understanding the limits of these regulations and their relation to social inequalities. This work will help improve understanding about the promise and limitations of the GDPR and CCPA/CPRA, and help create new tools, guidance, or recommendations for policymakers, organizations, and the public.

Read more about Sophia Baik and her research in a brief Q&A.

 

Jordan Famularo, Postdoctoral Scholar

Jordan Famularo is a former doctoral researcher in art history and archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where she designed and executed an international project focused on the fields of design thinking and cultural heritage. As a postdoctoral scholar at CLTC, Jordan will lead a research project looking for new ways to define, measure, and mitigate globally and culturally contextualized harms of digital products. 

Although data streams generate well-recognized opportunities and benefits, the by-products are not straightforward. Jordan will be addressing dimensions of insecurity that arise from data profusion in the global digital ecosystem. The objective is to evaluate economic, cultural, and other conceptual understandings of how societies deal with physical waste streams (such as carbon) and other externalities, and extend them to the digital environment as a means of developing practical solutions that mitigate harms.

Read more about Jordan Famularo and her research in a brief Q&A.

 

Grace-Alice Evans, Non-Resident Fellow

Grace-Alice Evans has a Master’s Degree from DePaul University in Telecommunications Engineering and a Bachelor’s Degree from Syracuse University’s iSchool of Information Technology. She has over 20 years of experience working as an IT consultant in intelligence, security, and defense for several Government agencies in the Washington D.C. area. Grace is joining CLTC as a non-resident fellow, where her research will focus on privacy and security issues that emerge in hybrid work environments. For many organizations in both public and private sectors, the post-pandemic work environment will be at least partially hybrid, with some people in physical proximity to each other and some remote. Many researchers are beginning work on how to build technologies, products, and social norms to enable effective hybrid work. Grace’s work will look over the horizon to identify privacy and security issues that will emerge in the hybrid environment, and design solutions (including policy and regulatory approaches) that can help to level the privacy and security playing field between remote and on-premise work.

 


 

CLTC is also pleased to welcome seven new graduate student researchers to the team for the summer: Cooper Aspegren, Andrew Chong, Omar Garcia, Thomas Gilbert, Prakash Krishnan, Ifejesu Ogunleye, and Isaac Vernon. Welcome!

 

Cooper Aspegren, School of Information, Master of Information and Data Science, Class of 2021

  • Research Area: Discourses of privacy in corporate Security & Exchange Commission filings
  • Brief description: Cooper will be conducting research on the language that businesses use to describe privacy risks in public financial risk disclosure documents, particularly with regard to new data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.

Andrew Chong, School of Information, PhD Candidate

  • Research Area: Surveying board cybersecurity practices for resilient governance
  • Brief description: This project, in partnership with Booz Allen Hamilton, surveys boards of directors on their cybersecurity beliefs and practices. The goal is to provide a better understanding of existing cybersecurity governance strategies, and help measure and bridge the gap between current practices and where boards believe they should be for effective cybersecurity governance.

Omar Garcia, School of Information, Master of Information and Cybersecurity, Summer 2021

  • Research Area: Embedding cybersecurity and privacy risk management in mergers & acquisitions
  • Brief description: We will develop empirical evidence of how boards, security executives, outside counsel, and other actors in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) cycle currently manage cybersecurity. We will develop an initial framework for improving cybersecurity risk management and oversight in M&A that can address the challenges that are revealed.

Thomas Gilbert, Interdisciplinary Studies, Machine Ethics and Epistemology, PhD Candidate 

  • Research Area: Public policy for reinforcement learning systems
  • Brief description: Reinforcement learning (RL) is a rapidly growing branch of AI research, focused on systems with the capacity to learn to exploit our dynamic behavior in real time. From YouTube’s recommendation algorithm to post-surgery opioid prescriptions, RL algorithms are poised to permeate our daily lives. The ability of the RL system to tease out behavioral responses, and the human experimentation inherent to its learning, motivate a range of crucial policy questions about RL’s societal implications that are distinct from those addressed in the literature on other branches of machine learning. With support from the CLTC, Thomas is drafting a whitepaper with collaborators to map these questions and articulate a range of effective policy responses to them.

Prakash Krishnan, School of Information, Master of Information and Data Science, Class of 2022

  • Research Area: Embedding cybersecurity and privacy risk management in mergers & acquisitions
  • Brief description: We will develop empirical evidence of how boards, security executives, outside counsel, and other actors in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) cycle currently manage cybersecurity. We will develop an initial framework for improving cybersecurity risk management and oversight in M&A that can address the challenges that are revealed.

Ifejesu Ogunleye, Berkeley Graduate Division, Master of Development Practice, Class of 2021

  • Research Area: Risk-based approaches to the regulation and governance of AI
  • Brief description: Ifejesu will be conducting research on the topic of AI regulation and the ways in which risk-based governance frameworks can help mitigate the risks posed by AI innovation. The project is expected to result in the publication of a CLTC white paper. She will also be providing support to relevant projects at the AI Security Initiative related to the governance and assessment of AI technologies.

Isaac Vernon, School of Information, 5th-Year Master of Information and Data Science, Class of 2021

  • Research Area: Hybrid workplace project 
  • Brief description: Isaac’s research is focused on trying to identify security and privacy asymmetries created from the hybrid work environment. The goal of this project is to identify and highlight the most critical aspects of these asymmetries, and propose base-level solutions to these emerging challenges.