Sixth annual women's lunch event at UNC Charlotte

Recently, I attended the sixth annual women's lunch event at UNC Charlotte. The event was sponsored by Siemens. I met a small group of female undergraduate and graduate students in computing and engineering. 

A few brilliant women at Siemens gave talks on their experience working at Siemen's, their path to success, and advice for female students in computing and engineering at UNC Charlotte. I enjoyed Jeannie Parsch's talk. She emphasized on the necessary skills for working in the industry. These skills are summarized in the slide below and the resume should cater for all these skills in order to secure a job.

Another important aspect that Jeannie discussed in her talk was how to effectively communicate with people and leave behind a legacy. She mentioned that if you are a good communicator, you can talk through a difficult situation even if you do not have a solution in mind. To do this, you need to 1) Practice positivity 2) Remain people oriented, and 3) Stay engaged. See the slide below.

Remote Desktop Connection

It gives me immense pleasure to share that today I learnt a new way of establishing remote desktop connection B-). I wish I had known about it sooner.
So, here are the steps to access a machine remotely:
1. Launch Google Chrome
2. Search for "Chrome remote desktop"
3. Intall the application
4. Enable remote desktop connection
5. Create an access code
The nice thing about this method is that it does not require a public IP address.

Now, to access this machine using another computer, follow the first three steps. Once you launch the application, you should be able to see a list of machines that can be accessed. Click on a machine you want to access, enter the access code, and VOILA :-).

Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2014

Recently, I attended SOUPS 2014 held at Facebook Headquarters, Menlo Park CA from July 9-11. Although I didn’t get a chance to explore the Facebook Headquarters much, I managed to take a few photos of the part I saw :-)
There were many great talks but I will briefly explain the ones I found particularly interesting.
Under the privacy track, the first two talks I enjoyed were related to the validity of Westin’s privacy index for the segmentation of user study population. Being a regular user of the well known Westin’s privacy index in user data analysis, I was surprised to find out from the speakers’ results that they did not find any correlation between users’ behavior and their responses to the three standard Westin questions. They proposed that the survey measures should be combined with behavioral data. One of the speakers proposed a clustering based technique to segment the user population. An interesting statistic in their study was that the US based users were less private than EU users, pointing me to another important conclusion—every country has different privacy preferences and that should be kept in mind while conducting a Mechanical turk study. In other words, the entire user study population should be from the same country to confirm homogeneity. The next interesting study was on the classification of Facebook users based on their privacy concerns. They collected Facebook user privacy preferences through an online survey, and based on their responses divided the user population into various groups. They analyzed these groups w.r.t various categories and presented their results using an interactive chart http://www.usabart.nl/chart/. For example, it was interesting to find out that the number of people who created friend lists was larger than the number of people who actually used these lists in their privacy settings. This can be attributed to the fact that when they create the lists there is no context since the interface for creating friend lists is on the homepage/newsfeed, but when they post something there is always a context but they are not able to use these lists since they were created out of context. Another interesting talk targeted a specific population— i.e., the unconcerned, or those with "nothing to hide" persona. These people do not care about privacy and do not think that they should be worried about their information being leaked or stolen. The summary of that talk was that the unconcerned people need to be educated about privacy since they have these attitudes because they are unaware of the possible consequences. The speaker gave a grocery list example, in which the students were told about what could be derived about them from the items in their shopping cart, e.g., cheap food items = person is poor. The study about privacy attitudes of mechanical turk workers was also interesting, where the US turkers were compared to the US internet users in hiding their online content and anonymity. The results showed that the turkers have more privacy concerns as compared to the other internet users. Next, the US turkers were compared to the indian turkers based on 1) how they managed their information online, and 2) what are their privacy preferences. They found out that the US turkers are more worried about anonymity and are unsatisfied with the laws compared to the indian turkers. Also, the indian turkers are more educated.
Under the mobile track, I enjoyed the talk on continuous passive touch based biometric authentication for smartphones. The speaker came up with a scheme to authenticate the smartphone user based on their usage behavior in order to prevent someone other than the owner of the phone from using it. This scenario can occur if someone gets access to the unlock code through shoulder surfing. Their proposed scheme used a machine learning approach using various slide/swipe and pinch features. Another great talk was on mobile application permission privacy. A huge number of free android mobile application apk files were downloaded and their binaries were analyzed. Permissions requested by each application were studied by going through their source code. They found out that either the third party libraries like social network service, analytics, and ads included in the application were requesting the permissions or they were being directly asked by the developer inside the application source code. The speaker also captured user privacy preferences through a crowd sourcing study. The users were showed screenshots from one of the mobile applications telling them that the location permission was being used for targeted advertising. The user had to tell how comfortable or uncomfortable they were with that. After capturing the responses, the user were clustered into four groups based on their privacy preferences. The study however only focused on free apps. So, the question about its validity on paid apps still remains.
Under the access control track, I liked the talk focusing on how to help users construct access control lists (ACL) on Facebook and help them in using them in their privacy settings. Previous work on presenting the users with automatically detected friend groups using CNM clustering does not significantly reduce user overhead. The speaker created a Facebook app to help the Facebook users create and manage friend lists apps.facebook.com/friendlist_manager/. They proposed and studied the use of caching on last used ACLs, and most used acls, and provided them to the users when they intend to share something on Facebook.
Under the warnings and dialogues track, I found the talk on the use of neuroscience to improve security warnings interesting. The static vs polymorphic warnings were presented to the users while they were going through fMRI scan. The users did not have to do anything. The results showed that the brain responses to polymorphic warnings were different even though the user didn't do anything. Therefore, they were more attention capturing and engaging. Thus, habituation is not equal to the user being lazy or careless but rather because of the neurologic effects it has. People ignore important information in dialogues, and are habituated to accept all dialogues. Another study showed that swipe and type on the dialogues rather than just using standard ANSI labeling guidelines can force people to pay attention to the status messages in the warning dialogues.

My First Ever Group Interview

Recently, I applied for the graduate life fellow position at my university. Graduate life fellows are graduate students who represent their departments to help other graduate students with their problems, conduct various events in their respective departments, and help build the graduate community.
Around 30 students from the applicant pool were selected for the 1st round of interview. This was a group interview-- where a group of interviewees are interviewed together in order to help the interviewers further narrow down the candidate list. The interviewees are asked to perform various group activities in order to assess their leadership and communication skills.
This was my very first group interview. So, I did not know what to expect. I prepared myself with the help of various online resources. I convinced myself not to be nervous, telling myself, in case I did not make it to the next round, I would at least be taking away a lot of experience with me.
As I entered the room, I found myself confronting a group of formally dressed individuals. I took a quick glace at myself--and reassured myself that I looked great. I have never been good at formal dressing. It was awkward since nobody was talking to each other. The interviewers were all there, glancing and smiling at each one of us. They had their grading sheets ready in their hands. Each one of them introduced themselves to us, and talked about the purpose of the interview.
The interview started off with an ice breaker activity. Each one of us had to introduce ourselves and answer the following three questions:
1) Unique thing about yourself?
2) Pet peeve - what annoys you the most?
3) An extreme sport that you played?
It was very hard for me to instantly come up with answers. My answers were as follows:
1) Unique thing about yourself?
I'm funny, and patient (have a good tolerance/perseverance level). I like to self learn new things in my free time.
2) Pet peeve - what annoys you the most?
Racism and rudeness.
3) An extreme sport that you played?
Fasting--if it were a sport. Many people in the U.S are astonished when I tell them that I am fasting and that I am not allowed to eat or drink from dawn to dusk.
We were then split up into two groups (6 and 7 members respectively) to perform two activities. Each activity was designed to test our team player spirit and how well we performed in a group. The committee was continuously observing us and taking notes.
The first activity involved touching numbers on pieces of papers glued on a carpet. The numbers had to be touched in a specific order in the shortest duration possible (in less than a minute). Each paper had a number written on it. At a time, only one person could touch a number on the carpet. The number was either represented as an equation, symbol, or as an english word. For example, 1 as UNO, 2 as too, 3 as the math symbol pi(3.142), 27 as 3x3x3, and 12 as a dozen eggs. Before the beginning of the activity, each one of us was given envelopes with pieces of the overall instructions and penalties in them. We had to join these pieces together and come of with a plan of how to perform the activity. One of our group members said that this task was in a way similar to the twister game. I had never heard of this game. We were given 3 chances to improve our time duration. Our times for the three rounds were 1.47 min, 1.8 min, and 46 sec respectively. We were told that we had been the fastest so far among all the groups.
The second activity presented us with a scenario and we had to come up with the best solution as a team. We were each handed a paper describing a scenario in which a group of people were out for hiking and were suddenly stuck in a blizzard and their minivan got damaged. They could not drive back home because of the snow and car damage. Their best bet was to spend the night over and leave tomorrow after the snow had stopped. The hikers had 15 items with them for survival. We had to rank the 15 items in order of their importance for the group's survival. These items were beef perky, blanket, shovel, hoses, knife, sunglasses, suv mirror, map of directions, compass, shotgun, cooking pot, lighter, gasoline, first aid kit, and gloves. We had to compare our individual ranking with the one we came up as a team. The interviewer then told us what the optimal solution was according to experts and how close we were to them. This was an interesting activity for me and I learnt some great survival tips.
At the end of these activities, we met the other group again and chatted with the interviewers and gave them our feedback regarding the activities. As I left the room, I was unsure of how well I did and whether I will get selected for the next round, but somehow I felt great. A few days later, I got an email saying that I had been selected for the final individual interview :-)

Facebook Frustration!

As much as I like spending time on Facebook, I have experienced many frustrating moments. This post is inspired by the unpleasant incidents that made me ponder over some possible Facebook applications.

1. Searching Newsfeed Posts - Every now and then scrolling through my Newsfeed, I come across posts that seem quite interesting but require an adequate amount of time to go through; articles and videos. So, in order to not procrastinate, I tell myself to take a look at them later. Now-- this 'later', never arrives at times-- simply because, many other posts have been stacked up on them. So, there I am, scrolling down my NewsFeed to get the specific post. Sometimes, I do succeed if others have re-shared it or I keep on looking while trying to remember the exact title of the post or the friend who shared it. This calls for a new Facebook app/extension--that could let you search your newsfeed with the keywords for a specific post that you are trying to find.

2. To Comment Or Not To Comment - I am sure many of you have been in this dilemma, when a close friend of yours posts something and kind of expects that you would comment something nice on it. Not a problem -- you can do that, but what you don't want is the flood of notifications arriving later, when other comments after you. That is why, most of the times I simply choose to 'like' the post instead of commenting, because it does not lead to any notifications :-). But there's something you can do about it incase you choose to comment. Click on a comment notification for the post you are not interested in anymore and click the small 'x' and choose 'unfollow' and voila! No more notifications for the uninteresting comments.