Pardis Emami Naeini

Carnegie Mellon University

PhD Candidate

Pardis Emami Naeini is a PhD candidate at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She is being co-advised by Prof. Lorrie Cranor and Prof. Yuvraj Agarwal. She holds a Master of Science degree in societal computing from CMU and a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran. Her research interests lie at the intersection of privacy, security, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Pardis is passionate about enabling people to make more informed privacy and security decisions, while interacting with Internet of Things (IoT) devices. During her PhD, Pardis has been awarded the CMU CyLab Presidential Fellowship as well as the UnifyID AI fellowship.

Research Abstract:

Privacy and security concerns are growing rapidly thanks to ubiquitous data collections by IoT devices. One way to alleviate such concerns is to design privacy assistants that provide users with transparency around these pervasive data collections so that they can gain some level of control over their data. To understand people’s privacy-related preferences and concerns toward IoT data collection, I first explored how users’ comfort with data collection and their desire to allow or deny it can be explained by factors such as data type or the purpose of data collection. I then worked on understanding how social cues can influence people’s privacy-related decisions toward allowing or denying IoT data collection. To inform consumers’ IoT-related purchase decisions, I explored how consumers prefer to be presented with privacy and security information of IoT devices at the time of purchase, and I am currently developing usable and effective privacy and security labels for IoT devices.