HotSoft

SOUPS and USER were hosted at Microsoft in Redmond, WA this week. It’s always nice to see everyone again and meet new people working in usable security. Listening to the SOUPS talks showed that the community of people engaged in trying to balance or increase both usability and security is growing every year. Our workshop went well, we were lucky to have a wide range of talks and great experts for the panel.  Alain presented a poster about our recent CHI paper, and Sonia presented one about our MVP framework for running authentication studies. Some of the non-academic highlights were the fake lawn on the Microsoft campus and the boat cruise around Seattle.

Each summer, Carleton hosts a group of high school students for Shad Valley’s summer enrichment program in sciences, engineering, technology and entrepreneurship. We held a half-day workshop in our lab for some of the students interested in HCI. Students imagined new applications as they learned about multitouch tabletop technologies, pretended to be attackers as they learned about usable security, and thought of new authentication mechanisms as they tried out the haptic input device.