News Category: General

  • General The Boston Globe

    How to keep data leaks from getting out of hand

    • February 16, 2017
    Many apps give the personal information they collect about you to other companies without explicitly asking your permission. David Choffnes, a computer scientist at Northeastern University, uses a program called ReCon to look for leaky apps. He’s found dozens, including a few that transmit the names, locations, and even passwords of smartphone users without their permission.
  • General TechRepublic

    Google will soon delete apps with no privacy policies from Play Store

    • February 14, 2017
    "I think it is a great thing that Google is putting more focus on users' privacy," said Engin Kirda, professor of computer science at Northeastern University. It is especially important in light of past cases in which apps available in the Play Store collected large volumes of sensitive data from users without their knowledge, including the URLs they visited, he added.
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    General

    Graduate Student Hackathon 2017

    • February 7, 2017
    The inaugural Graduate Student Hackathon, HACK NEU 2017, will take place Friday-Saturday February 11-12, 2017 in the classrooms (and hallways!) of the CCIS home base, West Village H. There are a […]
  • General News at Northeastern

    Study: Despite Trump’s win, polling is a strong elections predictor globally

    • February 3, 2017
    Leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the majority of polls had Democrat Hillary Clinton edging out Republican Donald Trump. When Trump won, criticism of this quantitative method of predicting elections swiftly took shape. As one Republican strategist noted on election night, “Tonight data died.” Not so, according to a new study led by Northeastern network scientist David Lazer. The study found that national election polls remain a strong indicator of election outcomes. The researchers’ statistical models, which leaned heavily on late polling data and current economic conditions, correctly predicted up to 90 percent of such direct executive elections.
  • Stacy Marsella
    General Gitalist Magazine

    Empathy: The Killer App for Artificial Intelligence

    • February 2, 2017
    Artificial intelligence that reads and responds to our emotions is the killer app of the digital economy. It will make customers and employees happier—as long as it learns to respect our boundaries. When psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman visited the Fore tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1967, he probably didn’t imagine that his work would become the foundation for some of the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI).
  • General News at Northeastern

    What can we learn about cybersecurity from the Russian hacks?

    • January 24, 2017
    On Inau­gu­ra­tion Day, NBC News reported that the FBI—aided by the CIA, the National Secu­rity Agency, and the Trea­sury Department—was car­rying out a counter-​​intelligence inves­ti­ga­tion to learn how, as NBC’s Ken Dilanian put it, “Russia’s efforts to manip­u­late public opinion in the U.S. pres­i­den­tial election…was paid for and whether any Amer­i­cans were involved.” The month before, myriad news out­lets reported Russia’s hacking of the Demo­c­ratic National Com­mittee and other polit­ical orga­ni­za­tions to influ­ence the elec­tion, with both the CIA and FBI agreeing about the source and aim of the hacks.
  • General Huff Post

    Computing and the fight against epidemics

    • January 23, 2017
    Since the earliest times, humankind has been permanently at war with infectious disease. However, a few decades ago, the scientific community experienced the euphoria of imminent victory. The introduction of antibiotics. The culling of common diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, and polio. The eradication of smallpox. Each new milestone led practitioners and the public at large to believe that we were on the verge of routing the enemy once and for all.