We’ve just returned from another successful SOUPS conference. It was once again held at CMU this year and it was a mix of old and new, with parts of the conference held in their new Computer Science building and other parts held in familiar locations that we all know to be part of SOUPS. Robert and I held a tutorial on experimental design and statistics using R. We were happy for our ISSNet friends at UBC who won this year’s Best Paper award for their work on Heuristics for IT security management tools. As usual, it was a great time to learn about the latest in usable security research, catch up with everyone in the field, and get to know some of the new people. The weather was unusually hot, resulting in power outages (and indoor bbqs), but overall a great week.
Last week was the ISSNet summer school, held at the University of Calgary this year. A day and a half was dedicated to information visualization. Sheelagh Carpendale gave a general introduction to the field of visualization and Robert Biddle presented about security visualizations in particular. Hands-on activities had everything testing their drawing skills as they came up with potential visualizations for datasets.
On Thursday afternoon, our lab hosted a group of high school students who were taking part in Shad Valley on campus. Shad Valley is a month-long enrichment summer camp for for highly motivated and successful high school students. Through presentations and hands-on activities in the workshop, students learned about multitouch, eye-tracking, and haptic technologies and were introduced to research in usable security.