IGERT: Usable Privacy and Security

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This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) project supports the development of an interdisciplinary graduate program at Carnegie Mellon University to train researchers in the field of usable privacy and security. The program will provide courses in security, privacy, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, economics, and psychology to complement the students' primary fields of study. There is growing recognition that privacy and security failures are often the results of cognitive and behavioral biases and human errors. Many of these failures can be attributed to poorly designed user interfaces or secure systems that have not been built around the needs and skills of their human operators; in other words, systems that have not made privacy and security usable. This IGERT will train cross-disciplinary researchers and develop methodologies, principles, and approaches that can be applied to diverse systems and applications. With social and economic activities becoming increasingly reliant on cyber infrastructure and with 60% of security breaches attributable to human failure, this IGERT addresses one of the most fundamental challenges faced by society today: designing usable secure systems. It does so by: (1) producing research advances that will provide for usable privacy and security in both current and future pervasive computing environments; (2) training a new generation of researchers to engage in interdisciplinary research on usable privacy and security and apply such research to real-world problems; (3) recruiting and training students underrepresented in traditional computer security and information assurance graduate programs. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.