[CSEE Talk] talk: Julia Rubin, Secret Life of Mobile Applications, 12pm Fri 4/8

[Tim Finin]

	     The Secret Life of Mobile Applications

		      Dr. Julia Rubin, MIT

	  12:00pm Friday, 8 April 2016, ITE 325b, UMBC

As software becomes increasingly more complex and yet more
pervasive, poor understanding of software behavior compromises
the quality and the integrity of software systems that we use. In
this talk, I will show that automated analysis techniques can
help to identify and reason about software behavior
characteristics that matter to humans. After a brief overview of
my current research directions, I will focus on techniques for
identifying privacy violations in mobile applications, i.e.,
leakages of sensitive information such as user location and
shopping preferences. I will present a set of solutions that rely
on contextual, functional and usage-based clues for improving the
accuracy of leakage detection and for distinguishing between
"legitimate" and "illegitimate" information distribution
patterns.


Julia Rubin (http://bit.ly/jrMiT) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in
the EECS department at MIT. Prior to that, she was a Research
Staff Member and, part of the time, a manager at IBM Research in
Haifa, Israel. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the
University of Toronto, Canada in 2014. Julia's research interests
are in software engineering, program analysis and software
security, focusing on improving the quality and the integrity of
modern software systems. Her recent work in this area won an ACM
Distinguished Paper Award at ASE, two Best Paper Awards, at SPLC
and CSMR, and was nominated for Facebook's Internet Defense Prize
at the USENIX Security Symposium.