data analytics

Abstract: Modern software development has embraced the concept of "code reuse," which is the practice of relying on third-party code to avoid "reinventing the wheel" (and rightly so). While this practice saves developers time and effort, it also creates liabilities: the resulting app may behave in ways that the app developer does not anticipate. This can cause very serious issues for privacy compliance: while an app developer did not write all of the code in their app, they are nonetheless responsible for it. In this talk, I will present research that my group has conducted to automatically examine the privacy behaviors of mobile apps vis-à-vis their compliance with privacy regulations. Using analysis tools that we developed and commercialized (as AppCensus, Inc.), we have performed dynamic analysis on hundreds of thousands of the most popular Android apps to examine what data they access, with whom they share it, and how these practices comport with various privacy regulations, app privacy policies, and platform policies. We find that while potential violations abound, many of the issues appear to be due to the (mis)use of third-party SDKs (i.e., supply chain problems). I will provide an account of the most common types of privacy and security issues that we observe and how app developers can better identify these issues prior to releasing their apps.

Bio: Serge Egelman

We are excited to announce a guest talk by Alexandra Diehl from the University of Zurich, who will present her latest research on the visualization and communication of weather forecasts. Alexandra is a senior researcher and lecturer in the Multimedia and Visualization group at UZH's Department of Computer Science. Her work focuses on efficient analysis, decision-making, and communication of high-impact weather events (HIWE) and their associated risks.

Talk Title: Visualization Research for Weather Forecast Communication and Analysis

Abstract: This talk will cover Alexandra's recent contributions to developing efficient visualization tools for analyzing and communicating weather forecasts and characterizing HIWEs. Additionally, she will discuss her current efforts in citizen data analysis and the challenges of effectively communicating severe weather events through participatory citizen science.

Speaker Bio: Alexandra Diehl holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires and has extensive experience in data visualization, visual analytics, and geographic information systems. She has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Data Visualization and Analysis Group at the University of Konstanz and currently works with Prof. Dr. Renato Pajarola's group at UZH.

We look forward to seeing many of you at this insightful talk.