Our Purpose
Digital technology now shapes how we work, learn, get care and connect with each other. It has also put large amounts of personal information online and created new risks for individuals, organizations and communities. Strong security and privacy protections are essential to keeping people safe online and to building digital systems that everyone can trust.
UC Noyce supports researchers and thinkers from all disciplines, career stages and backgrounds who are working to make digital systems more secure, protect personal data and make sure the benefits of digital innovation are shared fairly.
The Opportunity
We aim to support collaborative research that brings together technical, legal, ethical and social perspectives on cybersecurity and privacy. This includes protecting networks and critical systems from cyberattacks, safeguarding sensitive data such as health records, and addressing questions of consent, ownership and fair use of personal information. We also seek to address threats to the integrity of information, such as the spread of misinformation and polarization online.
UC Noyce takes a broad view of its thematic areas. Cybersecurity and privacy covers many disciplines that protect digital systems, data and the people they serve, including but not limited to:
- Health data privacy: protecting electronic health records, securing patient data shared across care settings, and building privacy into health research
- De-identification and re-identification risk: methods for anonymizing patient and personal data, and measuring how easily people could be re-identified from datasets
- Data ownership and consent: who owns personal and community data, how consent is given and withdrawn, and how individuals can control their own information
- Ethics of data use: fair, transparent and accountable practices for collecting, sharing and reusing data, especially data from vulnerable or underrepresented communities
- Privacy-preserving technologies: encryption, secure data sharing and differential privacy that allow research and analysis without exposing personal information
- Security of networks and critical infrastructure: protecting power grids, hospitals, water systems and other essential services from cyberattacks
- Threat detection and response: tools and methods for identifying, investigating and recovering from breaches, ransomware and other attacks
- Secure software and hardware: designing systems, devices and connected medical technologies that are secure from the start
- Information integrity: understanding and reducing the spread of misinformation, manipulation and polarization online
- Human factors in security: usable security, online safety and the ways people’s behavior shapes risk and protection
- Cybersecurity policy and law: data protection regulations, cross-border data governance and legal frameworks for accountability after a breach
- Equity in digital safety: making security and privacy protections accessible to all communities, including people with limited resources or digital access
The following are just a few examples of how UC Noyce Initiative research collaborations are making an impact in cybersecurity & privacy:
Evaluating Data Privacy Laws
UC Davis Associate Professor Zubair Shafiq and UC Irvine Professor Athina Markopoulou aim to develop novel auditing tools, using a combination of technological and policy approaches, to evaluate compliance to new and existing data privacy laws by consumers and regulators. Their work has already gained national media attention and been cited in a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Amazon.
Click here to learn more about this UC Noyce Initiative collaborative project.
De-Biasing Social Media
Associate Professor Zubair Shafiq, Professors Ian Davidson, Xin Liu and Magdalena Wojcieszak, plus graduate students are working to understand how the algorithms used by social media platforms to offer users recommendations for viewing might be reinforcing biases, and then to test a “de-biasing” intervention.
Click here to learn more about this UC Noyce Initiative collaborative research project.
Improving Human-AI Interactions
Professor Miguel Eckstein, Professor Mark Steyvers and Professor William Wang are leveraging an interdisciplinary research approach, aimed to address the challenges of human-AI interaction to make them more effective using empirical and theoretical approaches.
Click here to learn more about one of the PIs of this UC Noyce Initiative project.