The Blog of the International Computer Science Institute

Bill Marczak, a PhD student supervised by Networking and Security Director Vern Paxson, studies how repressive regimes around the world use technology to repress activists. He wants to bring international media attention to this practice and develop technical solutions and training to give activists the ability to protect themselves against cyber-attacks from regimes.

“I bring a certain type of research which is so often missing from activism,” Bill said. He noted that activist research often lacks rigorous evidentiary standards.

This year, ICSI began collaborating with the Research Center on Computer Platform Engineering (known as CIPI), a joint project of the Universities of Genoa and Padua, on the service composition paradigm for distributed applications. This paradigm is a way of visualizing and organizing the relationships among services that, together, make up a larger service composed by simple basic functionalities (i.e., web APIs) belonging to different domains such as social networks, e-commerce, news, and government data. Researchers from the center will visit ICSI to study how this paradigm can be applied to two areas, the Internet of Things (IoT), a network in which most physical objects we interact with on a daily basis will one day be connected, and Big Data. Michele Stecca, a CIPI researcher, will spend his postdoctoral fellowship working at ICSI on different components of the project.