Picture of Kentrell Owens, a handsome young man, presenting a poster at a conference

Kentrell Owens

PhD Candidate (2020 - present)

Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, USA
[my first name]@cs.washington.edu
Curriculum Vitae

My pronouns are he/him.
Google Scholar
Twitter: @KentrellOwens
Mastodon: @kentrellowens


About Me

I'm a fifth year PhD candidate at the University of Washington in the Security & Privacy Research Lab. My advisors are Franziska Roesner and Tadayoshi Kohno. My research area is computer security and privacy. My research interests include usable security and privacy, mobile/IoT security and privacy, and web security and privacy. I'm specifically interested in the computer security and privacy needs of underserved communities.

I earned my M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA) where I worked with Lorrie Cranor, and my B.S. from Rice University (Houston, TX). I grew up in rural northern Louisiana, and I'm a first-generation college student. I owe the victories in my life to all the investments my friends, family, teachers, and communities have made in me. If you're reading this, you might be one of those people; thank you!


Updates

10/9/2024 - I had a great time co-presenting with Elizabeth Vasquez about surveillance of prison communication at Artifical Justice: AI, Tech, and Criminal Defense hosted by the National Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers' Fourth Amendment Center and Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology. I am grateful for the invitation and really enjoyed meeting people and learning from the other presenters.

9/26/2024 - I excited to announce that I was accepted into the 2024 New England Computing & Data Science Rising Stars Program at Boston University; I'm really looking forward to traveling to BU in October!

7/16/2024 - I'm happy to announce that our paper on bias in computer vision (in collaboration with social psychologists at IUB) was accepted into AIES 2024. I look forward to heading to San Jose in October to present this work!


Publications

2025

2024

2023

  • The Surveillance AI Pipeline
    Pratyusha Ria Kalluri*, William Agnew*, Myra Cheng*, Kentrell Owens*, Luca Soldaini*, Abeba Birhane*
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.15084. Under review. 2023.

2022

2021

2020

2019

Last updated October 2024.