Fellows
Fellows will undertake research to increase transparency and advance consumers’ interests in the marketplace—devising new testing frameworks, tools, and procedures to evaluate values such as privacy, security, and fairness.
Fellows will have the opportunity to collaborate with a diverse community of technologists, leverage CR’s physical labs and testing infrastructure, and communicate findings to manufacturers, policymakers, and the public.
Applications for our 2020 non-resident fellowships are now closed. We appreciate your interest and hope that you will consider applying next year when we reopen applications for the 2021 season. If you would like to be kept up to date on Digital Lab news, please sign up here.
Consumer Reports, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has named five public interest technology researchers to its inaugural Digital Lab Fellows cohort.
Digital Lab Fellows develop new testing tools and methods to study emerging consumer harms in fields like IoT, machine decision making, and the data broker economy. Meet our inaugural class!
Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Kasia Chmielinksi
Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Kasia Chmielinski is the Co-Founder of The Data Nutrition Project, an initiative that builds tools to improve the health of artificial intelligence through better data. They are also a technologist at McKinsey & Company in Healthcare Analytics and previously worked at The U.S. Digital Service (Executive Office of the President) and Scratch, a project of the MIT Media Lab. They studied physics at Harvard University. When not in front of a whiteboard or a keyboard, Kasia can be found birdwatching or cycling uncomfortably-long distances on a bicycle.
Associate Research Scientist, Khoury College C&IS, Northeastern University
Daniel Dubois
Associate Research Scientist, Khoury College C&IS, Northeastern University
Daniel J. Dubois is an associate research scientist at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, working on understanding the privacy implications of the Internet of Things, and founding member of the Mon(IoT)r IoT lab. Daniel's research is rooted in software engineering, specifically on decentralized and self-adaptive software architectures. As his work has matured, he has become more interested in distributed systems, in particular from a privacy perspective, which he focuses on now. Daniel earned his PhD in information engineering from Politecnico di Milano, where he interned at IBM Haifa Research Lab. He then participated as a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Media Lab funded by Toshiba and Progetto Rocca, as well as Imperial College London funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie program. Daniel's research resulted in the publication of over 30 research papers and has been covered by the popular press, including the New York Times, Financial Times, USA Today, BBC World News, and The Independent.
Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan
Roya Ensafi
Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan
Roya Ensafi is an assistant professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, where her research focuses on computer networking, security, and privacy. She designs scalable techniques and systems to protect users’ Internet connections from disruption and surveillance. Roya is best known for her work in the area of Internet censorship, where she pioneered the use of side-channels to remotely measure adversarial manipulation of Internet traffic. She is a founder of Censored Planet a global censorship observatory that continuously monitors various types of network interference in over 170 countries since August 2018. Her notable projects with real-world impact include researching and documenting the Kazakhstan HTTPS MitM interception, the Great Cannon of China, and large-scale study of server-side geoblocking. She has received the NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative award and the Google Faculty Research Award.
PhD Student, IMDEA Networks
Julien Gamba
PhD Student, IMDEA Networks
Julien Gamba is a PhD student in the Internet Analytics Group at the IMDEA Networks Institute. He graduated with honors from the university of Strasbourg (France) with a master of science in computer networks and embedded systems. His research revolves around user's privacy in mobile devices and networks. In his work, Julien uses both static and dynamic analysis, as well as custom techniques specifically designed to understand the behavior of mobile applications. Recently, Julien was the first author of the first large-scale analysis of the privacy and security risks of pre-installed software on Android devices and their supply chain, which was awarded the Best Practical Paper Award at the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2020. This study was featured in many newspaper with large circulation such as The Guardian (UK), the New York Times (USA), CDNet (USA) or El País (Spain). Julien was also awarded the ACM IMC Community Contribution Award in 2018 for his analysis of domain ranking services.
Doctoral candidate in Computer Science, Princeton / CITP
Arunesh Mathur
Doctoral candidate in Computer Science, Princeton / CITP
Arunesh Mathur is a graduate student in the department of computer science at Princeton University. Mathur's research examines the societal impacts of technical systems through an empirical lens. His recent work has shown how commercial, political, and other powerful actors employ dark patterns to exploit individuals and society. His research has received two best paper awards (ACM CSCW and USENIX SOUPS) and the Privacy Papers for Policy Makers Award.
Consumer Reports is an independent nonprofit organization that operates the world’s largest consumer educational and product testing center. Today, we are building tools and methods to better evaluate and report on connected products and services—examining everything from the behavior of connected appliances to the data practices of major internet platforms. Through this fellowship program, we seek to support new work in the field, and develop tooling and infrastructure to power ongoing public interest research.
The fellowship is a 10 month collaboration. Each fellow’s time commitment will be based on the fellow’s project idea and project plan. We offer a generous stipend, project support, and a travel budget. Research universities are encouraged to consider nominating fellows.
Fellows will attend an onboarding meeting in New York, participate in monthly calls with the fellowship cohort, and provide regular updates on their research progress. Fellows can work from anywhere. They will have the opportunity to collaborate with technologists and technicians who are part of the Digital Lab, leverage CR’s physical labs and testing infrastructure, and tap into the collective intelligence of our growing community of public interest technologists. In addition to advancing original research, we’re hoping that fellows will help innovate tools, methodologies and systems that can be taken up by future code maintainers and lab technicians at CR and other testing organizations.
Anyone interested in public interest technology research is welcome to apply. The fellowship may be of interest to engineers, computer scientists, information security professionals, independent researchers, academics, social scientists, and others. There is no specific educational or experience prerequisite required for the fellowship. We expect that some fellowships will be awarded to outstanding masters graduates, PhDs, post-docs, and established researchers or professors. We also welcome applications from independent technologists and professionals based within for-profit commercial organizations, though these applicants must undergo a conflict-of-interest review.
We invite prospective fellows to propose projects that align with a set of broad methodological and infrastructural challenges around the evaluation of consumer privacy, data security, and other emerging consumer technology issues. We award fellowships to people, not ideas—but applicants with a well-articulated project proposal will be more competitive. For interested applicants who don’t have a specific project proposal, we can help scope a research collaboration based on the applicant’s interests and experience.
We welcome project proposals in any format, but offer some general guidelines. First, check out the Digital Standard (http://thedigitalstandard.org) to get a sense of the values we think should be reflected in connected products and services. We recommend framing your proposed project in terms of alignment with specific criteria, indicators, or procedures laid out in the Digital Standard. A good project proposal will include a problem statement or research question and a rough workplan, and will explain how resulting knowledge or findings might advance the public interest. An especially strong proposal might outline anticipated open source code contributions. By opening up our labs and creatively partnering with public interest technology researchers, we hope to better educate the public, raise companies’ standards, and ultimately empower consumers with better products and services. We are therefore particularly interested in applicants who understand how to leverage their proposed projects to drive change at a systems or policy level.
Yes! We encourage collaboration with Consumer Reports researchers and reporters, but you’ll own the work you do as part of your fellowship, and can work with the Digital Lab community to determine the best disclosure strategy for any original findings. However, we’re looking for prospective fellows who share our desire to build durable tooling and infrastructure to enable ongoing consumer product testing. We therefore ask fellows to make new test procedures, tools, and other code they develop as part of their fellowship available through an open source license—so CR and others in the public interest tech ecosystem can benefit from a growing set of shared resources.
IoT: Connected appliances collect, manipulate, and share data to perform their stated functions. But the terms of service under which these activities take place are very broad and permissive. What data is actually being collected? Is it being used only for the intended purpose? What other business relationships are being established? Are the products secure against potential intrusion? Are the manufacturers pursuing industry-leading development practices? Are they abiding by emerging privacy standards?
Cars: With the advent of advanced telemetrics, various levels of autonomous driving, and roadside assistance programs, cars and trucks are becoming data platforms. However, most consumers view their vehicles as private spaces and physical goods, rather than as nodes in a larger data network. What data collection is happening while you are driving your car? Is it being sold to other companies, like your insurance provider or employer? What type of coordination is occurring with various forms of law enforcement? How much autonomy, agency, and control are being surrendered by consumers?
Data Brokers: Huge amounts of personal data is being collected, aggregated, and sold by data brokers. This activity is often disclosed and permitted by privacy policies and terms of service, but remains largely invisible to consumers and outside the realm of inspection and regulation by authorities. What type of tactics—disclosed, intentionally hidden, or illicit—are being used by data brokers to collect consumer data? What types of data are most valuable? Why? How does the market work? What are the emerging trends in the industry? What new, potential threats are emerging to consumer privacy and security?
Fellows’ activities will vary depending on their interests and research questions. Here’s a partial list of research activities that might be in scope: building tools to enable broad identification, monitoring, decryption, and inspection of network traffic and endpoints; ecosystem mapping of manufacturers, advertisers, retailers, software publishers, and software developers; analysis, monitoring, and tracking of legal policies and standards; testing hypotheses about product behavior using static and dynamic analysis; negotiating testbeds or legal permissions to audit code or databases; user studies to understand the effects of obfuscation, behavioral manipulation, or dark patterns…if you are interested in this fellowship, you’ve probably got a few ideas—we want to hear from you!
CR staff and advisors will review the applications and evaluate for alignment with CR’s mission and commitment to evidence-based testing for the public interest. Semi-finalists will be invited for interviews; finalists will work with CR to further articulate the scope of collaboration and identify any additional support needed.
If you can’t find the answer to your question here, you can reach out to digitallab@cr.consumer.org.
The fellowship is made possible through the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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