Keynote speakers

We are thrilled to announce our (two) keynote speakers for EthiCS 2022 @EuroS&P’22.

Dr. Elissa M. Redmiles

Talk: Exploring Ethical Values in Computer Security Research: Three Case Studies with Real World Impact

Ethical values are encoded in numerous decisions throughout the computer security research process. How can we challenge the ethical values we hold and ensure that we're carefully considering the perspectives of other research communities and communities of study when we make research decisions? We will explore answers to this question through three computer security research case studies: one focused on encouraging the adoption of COVID-19 apps, one focused on investigating how to keep a marginalized community -- sex workers -- safer online, and one focused on creating guidelines for appropriate development in virtual reality.

Bio: Dr. Elissa M. Redmiles is a faculty member and research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. She uses computational, economic, and social science methods to understand users’ security, privacy, and online safety-related decision-making processes. Her work has been recognized with multiple paper awards at USENIX Security, ACM CCS and ACM CHI and has been featured in popular press publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, Wired, Business Insider, and CNET. Dr. Redmiles will be a Visiting Scholar at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University for the 2022-2023 academic year and has additionally served as a consultant and researcher at multiple institutions, including Microsoft Research, Facebook, the World Bank, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the University of Zurich.

Dr. Rob Jansen

Talk: Toward Safer Tor Research

Tor is a privacy-preserving anonymous communication network in which user safety is of highest priority. Unfortunately, researchers often run experiments on Tor without carefully considering user safety or the ethical implications of their work. The Tor Research Safety Board was created in 2016 to help guide researchers in analyzing the safety of their research plan and in developing safer research methods. In this talk, Rob will outline the Tor Research Safety Board and its guidelines. He will then discuss some recent technical work that enables researchers to run Tor experiments with absolutely zero safety or privacy risks to the Tor network or its users. He will conclude with some general thoughts about the struggles in conducting safe and ethical research.

Bio: Dr. Rob Jansen is a Computer Scientist and a Jerome and Isabella Karle Distinguished Scholar at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He developed the Shadow network simulator and is an expert in Tor network modeling and simulation. He has extensively studied Tor performance problems, scalability improvements, incentives for growing the network, and resource and routing attacks. Rob focuses on transitioning research to practice: Shadow has become the standard tool for simulating Tor networks and is used at dozens of universities worldwide; KIST is now the default scheduler for transferring Tor’s traffic; and PrivCount enables the safe discovery of novel Tor network statistics. Rob serves on numerous security and privacy focused academic committees, including for USENIX Security, ACM CCS, PoPETs, and FOCI, and has served on the Tor Research Safety Board since its inception in 2016.