Pardis Emami-Naeini, Ph.D.

pardis at cs dot washington dot edu

I am currently a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Computer Science at University of Washington (UW), working with Prof. Yoshi Kohno and Prof. Franzi Roesner. Prior to UW, I received my PhD and MSc in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) under Prof. Lorrie Cranor and  Prof. Yuvraj Agarwal in 2020 and 2018, respectively.

At CMU, I was working on devising tools and methods to better inform people's privacy and security decision-making in the world of Internet of Things (IoT). During the summer of 2019, I completed an awesome research internship at the Cryptography and Privacy Research group under Kristin Lauter and Kim Laine, and in Summer 2017, I completed another fantastic internship at Intel Corporation under Mohammad Reza Haghighat. Prior to CMU, I received my BSc in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran in 2015, where I was advised by Prof. Ali Movaghar.

I am currently on the academic job market. Please get in touch if you are hiring in the intersection of security, privacy, and human-computer interaction.

CV / Google Scholar / Twitter

Recent News

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  • [September 2021] Presented at University of Washington, Security and Privacy Affiliates Workshop.
  • [August 2021] Presented at SOUPS'21.
  • [May 2021] Presented at IEEE S&P'21.
  • [May 2021] Paper accepted at SOUPS'21.
  • [April 2021] Paper accepted at IEEE S&P'21.
  • [March 2021] Serving on IEEE S&P'22 Program Committee.
  • [March 2021] Serving on USENIX Security'22 Program Committee.
  • [March 2021] Serving on PETS'22 Program Committee.
  • [February 2021] Presented at USENIX Enigma.

Publications

  1. Pardis Emami-Naeini, Tiona Francisco, Tadayoshi Kohno, Franziska Roesner. Understanding Privacy Attitudes and Concerns Towards Remote Communications During the COVID-19 Pandemic. SOUPS’21.

    [Paper] [Slides] [Video]

  2. Pardis Emami-Naeini, Janarth Dheenadhayalan, Yuvraj Agarwal, Lorrie Cranor. Which Privacy and Security Attributes Most Impact Consumers’ Risk Perception and Willingness to Purchase IoT Devices?. IEEE S&P’21.

    [Paper] [Website] [Slides] [Video]

  3. Pardis Emami-Naeini, Yuvraj Agarwal, Lorrie Cranor, and Hanan Hibshi. Ask the Experts: What Should Be on an IoT Privacy and Security Label?. IEEE S&P’20.

    [Paper] [Website] [Slides] [Video]

  4. Pardis Emami-Naeini, Yuvraj Agarwal, Lorrie Cranor, and Henry Dixon. Exploring How Privacy and Security Factor into IoT Device Purchase Behavior. CHI’19.

    [Paper] [Website] [Slides]

  5. Pardis Emami-Naeini, Martin Degeling, Richard Chow, Lujo Bauer, Lorrie Cranor, Mohammad Reza Haghighat, and Heather Patterson. The Influence of Friends and Experts on Privacy Decision Making in IoT Scenarios. CSCW’18.

    [Paper] [Slides]

  6. Hana Habib, Pardis Emami-Naeini, Summer Devlin, Maggie Oates, Chelse Swoopes, Lujo Bauer, Nicolas Christin, and Lorrie Faith Cranor. User Behaviors and Attitudes Under Password Expiration Policies. SOUPS’18.

    [Paper] [Slides]

  7. Sarah Pearman, Jeremy Thomas, Pardis Emami-Naeini, Hana Habib, Lujo Bauer, Nicolas Christin, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Serge Egelman, and Alain Forget. Let’s Go in For a Closer Look: Observing Passwords in Their Natural Habitat. CCS’17.

    [Paper]

  8. Pardis Emami-Naeini, Sruti Bhagavatula, Hana Habib, Martin Degeling, Lujo Bauer, Lorrie Cranor, and Norman Sadeh. Privacy Expectations and Preferences in an IoT World. SOUPS‘17.

    [Paper] [Slides]

  9. Blase Ur, Felicia Alfieri, Maung Aung, Lujo Bauer, Nicolas Christin, Jessica Colnago, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Henry Dixon, Pardis Emami-Naeini, Hana Habib, Noah Johnson, and William Melicher. Design and Evaluation of a Data-Driven Password Meter. CHI’17.

     Best Paper Award 

    [Paper]

  10. Primal Pappachan, Martin Degeling, Roberto Yus, Anupam Das, Sruti Bhagavatula, William Melicher, Pardis Emami-Naeini, Shikun Zhang, Lujo Bauer, Alfred Kobsa, Sharad Mehrotra, Norman Sadeh, and Nalini Venkatasubramanian. Towards Privacy-Aware Smart Buildings: Capturing Communicating, and Enforcing Privacy Policies and Preferences. ICDCSW’17.

    [Paper]

Selected Media Coverage

Mentorship

Over the years, I have worked with many amazing, smart, and creative undergraduate and graduate students at CMU and UW, including:

We Designed an IoT Privacy and Security Label

IoT consumers are concerned about the privacy and security of their smart devices, but they cannot do much about it at the time of purchase as such information is not available to them when making a purchase decision, at least in the United States and most countries. In the past few years, countries such as Finland, UK, and Singapore started designing a label for IoT devices to inform consumers about the privacy and security practices of smart devices at the point of sale. We believe US consumers have the same right to know what their devices are doing with their information, therefore we decided to bring this much-needed transparency to consumers at the time of purchase. 

By conducting a series of studies and incorporating inputs from thousands of consumers and experts, we developed an informative and usable privacy and security label for IoT devices. In addition, to help manufacturers easily create these labels for their products, we developed a tool to generate the human and machine readable formats of the labels. Unlike other international efforts in labeling IoT devices, our labels are designed in such a way to not only inform consumers’ purchase decision making, but also to educate the average consumers about the most critical privacy and security information about their devices.

If you are interested in knowing more, check out our project website.

I also draw doodles!

For as long as I remember, doodling has been a meditation for me. I draw chaos and find meaning in it.