CITP Announces 2009-10 Visitors

Today, I’m pleased to announce CITP’s visitors for the upcoming academic year.

Deven R. Desai, Visiting Fellow: Deven is an Associate Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and a permanent blogger at Concurring Opinions. Professor Desai’s scholarship centers on intellectual property, information theory, and Internet-related law. He plans to work on a major project exploring the ways trademark law can foster, or limit, online innovation.

James Katz, Visiting Fellow. Jim is Professor, Chair of the Department of Communication, and Director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, where he holds the University’s highest professorial rank. He has devoted much of his career to exploring the social consequences of new communication technology, especially the mobile phone and Internet. Currently he is looking at how personal communication technologies can be used by teens from urban environments to engage in informal science and health learning. This research is being carried out through an NSF-sponsored project with New Jersey’s Liberty Science Center.

Rebecca MacKinnon, Visiting Fellow (spring term): Rebecca is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. She is currently on leave, as an Open Society Fellow, to work on a book tentatively titled “Internet Freedom and Control: Lessons from China for the World.” She will spend the spring 2010 semester at CITP, continuing to work on the book. Rebecca is a cofounder of Global Voices, a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, and a former television journalist, having served as CNN’s bureau chief in Beijing and, later, Tokyo.

Jens Grossklags, Postdoctoral Research Associate: Jens, a new PhD from the UC Berkeley School of Information, studies information economics and technology policy. He focuses on the intersection of privacy, security, and network systems. His approach is highly interdisciplinary, combining economics, computer science, and public policy. Currently, he is investigating the ways institutions and end users make decisions about complex computer security risks under conditions of uncertainty and limited information.

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Visiting Postdoctoral Research Associate: Joe, whose work is supported by the NSF ACCURATE Center, also earned his PhD from the UC Berkeley School of Information. His dissertation examined public policy mechanisms for making computerized voting systems more transparent. He continues to work along the same lines, drawing lessons from voting machines, gaming machines and other technologies on how to best protect users from error and malicious activity.

In addition to these full time appointments, the Center will also welcome two Visiting Research Collaborators on an occasional basis: Alex Halderman, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan (and recently in the news for his research group’s analysis of China’s Green Dam software), and David Lukens, an attorney who has been collaborating on the Center’s transparency work.