The National Internet Observatory (NIO) is an NSF-funded Midscale infrastructure project at Northeastern University that aims to help researchers understand how people behave online and how platforms structure what people see. To that end, the NIO works in two steps: 1) ethically collecting data from participants about their online experience; and 2) safely making this data available for analysis to qualified researchers.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of the types of data that the NIO currently collects, and how this can be leveraged by researchers to enable (privacy) research. The NIO infrastructure provides a unique corpus of data that we believe will enable a wide range of new research, and we are seeking input from domain experts for what additional features we should include in our data collection and analysis infrastructure.

About Álvaro Feal

Álvaro Feal is a Senior Research Scientist researcher at Northeastern University working with Prof. David Choffnes. He leads the Android app development efforts for the National Internet Observatory. His research focuses mainly on analyzing security and privacy issues both on Android and the web, using hybrid methodologies that combine static and dynamic analysis. His research has been published in different venues such as ACM IMC, PETS Symposium and USENIX Security and has received several awards such as the Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security 2019.

This event will be conducted in English