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April 29, 2021 – Democracy Perspectives from Computer Science: Challenges and Opportunities

Posted in: Democracy 2021, Event, Opportunities

Democracy Perspectives from Computer Science: Challenges and Opportunities

April 29, 2021

7:00pm EST

In this panel, faculty from the Computer Science department at Montclair State University will discuss the state of cybersecurity with respect to democracy and elections, drawing on a data-informed perspective. For computing professionals, the animating questions focus on the capacity and availability of tools for interfering and protecting democracy. The emphasis is on uncovering and revealing challenges and opportunities with respect to technologies and democracy. Several brief case studies involving social media, electronic voting, or data mining, will be discussed.Panelists: Constantine Coutras, chair and professor, conducts research in the areas of Computer Networking (performance evaluation of data communication protocols) and Digital Filter Design. He is also interested in Computer and Network Security. Boxiang Dong, assistant professor, has research interests that fall into the intersection of cybersecurity and big data analytics. Chris Leberknight, associate professor, specializes in Digital democracy (online censorship), Cyber Security, Modeling and Analysis of Technological and Social Networks. Stefan Robila, professor and Director of the Computational Sensing Laboratory, has research interests in computational sensing, including development and implementation of computationally efficient feature extraction algorithms that use high performance computing. In addition he has also worked on greening the computing infrastructure and cybersecurity. Bharath Kumar Samanthula, assistant professor, has research interests that span across Applied Cryptography, Information Security, Data Mining, and Big Data. His current work centers around privacy-enhanced techniques for various distributed data management and analysis tasks in the fields of Online Social Networks, Cloud Computing, Wireless Sensor Networks and Smart Grids. Omar Alkhalili, a MSU graduate student, has worked in application support and quality assurance testing at various tech companies in the New York metropolitan area. He is interested in automation, cyber security and social media misinformation.

 

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