Heinz Professor to Speak at Black Hat Security Conference

Release Date: May 12, 2009

H. John Heinz III College's Alessandro Acquisti will be presenting a briefing titled, "I Just Found 10 Million SSNs" for the Black Hat security conference in July.

Acquisti is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at Heinz College and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). He is also a member of the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory, a member of CMU Privacy Technology Center, and a partner at Carnegie Mellon CyLab.

Acquisti's research focuses on what he calls the behavioral economics of privacy — in other words, understanding the trade-offs, the incentives and the behavioral and cognitive biases associated with protecting and revealing personal information.

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon faculty, Acquisti researched with the Internet Ecologies group at the Xerox PARC labs in Palo Alto; with the Human-Centered Computing group at RIACS, NASA Ames Research Center; and at SIMS, UC Berkeley, where he received a Master and a Ph.D. in Information Systems in 2001 and 2003. Acquisti received also a Master in Economics from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1999; and a Master in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the London School of Economics in 1999.

Black Hat is one of the premier security gatherings in the world. This year's conference is slated for July 25-30 in Las Vegas, NV.

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