HotSoft

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.

ISSNet is an NSERC strategic network on computer security. Each year, a week long summer school is organized for members of the network. This first year, it was held at the École Polytechnique de Montréal from August 2nd to August 7th. It is an opportunity for ISSNet researchers and students across the country to get to know each other, discuss on-going research, and learn about various security topics. Each day, in-class and hands-on lab sessions were taught by instructors from participating universities on subjects like experimental security research, phishing, and network device and protocol abuse. Two members of our lab, Robert Biddle and Sonia Chiasson, co-presented a one-day workshop on usable security and HCI methodologies with Kirstie Hawkey from UBC.  Students from our lab found that the week-long summer school was “cool and seriously informative”.