Roya Ensafi - University of Michigan

Updates

October 2022: I served as Publicity Chair for IMC'22.
September 2022: I served as Chair for EGS'22.
August 2022: Our paper, A Large-scale Investigation into Geodifferences in Mobile Apps, appeared in USENIX Security Symposium.
August 2022: I am the program co-chair for FOCI'22.
August 2022 I served on the PC for Sec'22.
June 2022: I served as Co-Technical-Chair for TMA'22.
May 2022: I was a finalist for the ACUM Outstanding Advisor Award.
April 2022: I was a panelist on The Feeling of Being Watched, sponsored by Dissonance, ITS, and Wallace House.
February 2022: I was invited to talk at Brave about The Story of Censored Planet
January 2022: I was an invited Panelist and consultant for White House officials on existing projects for The Alliance for the Future of the Internet.
December 2021: Invited by the President of the United States, I participated on Democracy–Affirming Technology panel at The Summit for Democracy..
November 2021: I participated at Trust Conference on The Human Cost of Internet Shutdowns.
November 2021: We uploaded a recorded version of our Censored Planet Webinar.
November 2021: Diwen presented our paper (recognized as the highest scoring short paper!) on Russia's Twitter throttling at IMC '21.
November 2021: I served on the PCs for Sec '21, IMC '21, and FOCI '21.
October 2021: I was an invited panelist for The Human Cost of Internet Shutdowns at OFF '21.
October 2021: I announced the alpha release of the Censored Planet Dashboard, developed in collaboration with Jigsaw.
October 2021: We hosted a Censored Planet Community Webinar with over 50 attendees!
September 2021: I am part of the OTF IFF Advisory Council Cohort for 2020-21.
September 2021: I was awarded two DRL Internet Freedom grants (Co-PI).
September 2021: I was awarded a DARPA grant (PI) for the project Leveraging machine learning to build an intelligent Censored Planet observatory.
May 2021: I gave a lightning talk on our VPNalyzer project at a webinar for the Consumer Reports Digital Lab Fellows.
April 2021: We published a report on Russia's throttling of twitter.
March 2021: Reethika and I were invited panelists at the Consumer Reports Workshop, Exploring VPNs, with over 1500 attendees.
March 2021: Anjali presented our COVID paper at FC '21.
March 2021: We opened our VPNalyzer user survey, with support from the Consumer Reports Digital Lab.
February 2021: Ram gave an invited talk on Censored Planet at the DNS Privacy Workshop '21 (colocated with NDSS).
November 2020: Ram was a finalist in the 2020 Michigan CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition, representing the Michigan Systems Lab.
November 2020: We published a report on Censored Planet.
November 2020: Ram presented our Censored Planet paper at CCS '20.
November 2020: Our NDSS '20 paper on Russia was selected as a finalist and was among the Top 10 papers for the US-Canada region at the CSAW '20 Applied Research Competition.
October 2020: Ram presented our paper (nominated for the best paper award!) on investigating HTTPS interception in Kazakhstan at IMC '20.
October 2020: I served on the PCs for IMC '20 and PoPETs '20.
September 2020: I was on the steering committee for WTMC '20 (colocated with Euro S&P).
September 2020: I was named as a Consumer Reports Digital Lab Fellow for 2020-21! My team will be investigating the VPN ecosystem through large-scale data-driven analysis.
September 2020: I was awarded a DRL Internet Freedom grant (PI) for the project Censored Planet: A Global Observatory for Internet Censorship.
August 2020: Reethika gave an invited talk about Russia's decentralized control at the Next Generation Democracy Cafe.
August 2020: I co-chaired FOCI '20. This was the 10th anniversary of FOCI (Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet, colocated with USENIX Security), with a record number of submitted papers (2x past years and 2021), registered participants, and attendees per talk (70 on average). My PhD student, Reethika served as the Student Organizer.
August 2020: We published a report on US websites geoblocked in Hong Kong.
June 2020: Ram gave a talk on the Censored Planet observatory at OONI IMV '20.
February 2020: Ram presented our Filtermap paper and Reethika presented our Russia paper at NDSS '20!
February 2020: We published a report on Filtermap.
January 2020: I gave an invited talk, Censorship Proliferation: Three Transformations in the Globally Spreading Practice of Online Censorship, at Princeton CITP, Iowa University, and Macquarie University.
December 2019: I was on the organizing committee for Big-DAMA '19 (colocated with ACM CoNEXT).
November 2019: We published a report on Russia's decentralized censorship model.
October 2019: I served on the PCs for IMC '19, FOCI '19, Sec '20, and Oakland S&P '19.
August 2019: I founded WISER, a group for Women in SEcurity Research. I also serve as the faculty advisor.
July 2019: Ram and Reethika attended the 2019 Citizen Lab Summer Institute through Citizen Lab's travel grants and hosted a session on investigating MitM interceptions in Kazakhstan.
July 2019: We published a report on Kazakhstan's HTTPS interception.
May 2019: Reethika gave a PhD lightning talk, Decentralized Control of the Network, at the Mozilla Security Research Summit.
May 2019: I gave a keynote talk at WTMC '19 (colocated with Oakland S&P).
December 2018: I gave a talk on building the Censored Planet observatory at CCC '18.
December 2018: I served as a Travel Grants Chair for CoNEXT '18.
November 2018: Reethika presented our lab's work at the Research Process Workshop.
October 2018: I served on the PCs for CCS '18, FOCI '18, and RAID '18.
September 2018: Reethika presented our lab's work at the CS Kickstart event.
August 2018: I served as a session chair for Sec '18 and FOCI '18.
August 2018: Ram gave a lightning talk on Censored Planet at FOCI '18.
April 2018: I was awarded an OTF grant (PI).
February 2018: I was awarded a Google Faculty Research Award.
February 2018: I was awarded a NSF-CRII grant (PI).
November 2017: I served on the PCs and as a session chair for IMC '17 and FOCI '17.