Tanusree Sharma, assistant professor in the College of IST, recently received the 2024 John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award for her research contributions while a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her doctoral degree in July.
The award, presented at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2024 in Philadelphia last month, recognizes scholars for their research in usable privacy and security, their mentorship efforts and their service to the community.
“This award is a reflection to me of the research I have had the privilege to undertake with mentors and colleagues,” Sharma said. “It is also a significant motivation and reaffirms my commitment to continue pushing in this direction in advancing usable security research for goal-oriented tools for marginalized groups and contributing to the shared objective of creating a safer, user-centric digital world.”
Sharma works to develop technologies in a secure and ethical manner, particularly to address privacy and security concerns of underserved and marginalized communities that may be disproportionately impacted by emerging technologies that overlook their unique needs.
The award committee recognized several of Sharma’s projects, including the development of an ethical, disability-first dataset creation to support novel algorithm development for managing the privacy of images and videos for people with visual impairments. Also highlighted were Sharma’s research contributions to diverse applications within the usable security domain, such as addressing entry barriers that diverse user groups face with key management in decentralized systems by designing an inclusive and accessible multi-factor key derivation function that balances security and usability.
Sharma’s community service was also recognized. She has designed and taught semester-long Massive Open Online Courses classes for students in Bangladesh to support their computing research, and she has organized workshops at leading security conferences, such as SOUP.