Yang Wang



Research Summary


My research focuses on privacy and security, and social computing. I study people's privacy/security attitudes, concerns, decision-making, and behaviors. I use insights from these empirical studies to design usable mechanisms that enhance people's awareness and control of their privacy and security. My research draws theories and techniques from information and computer sciences (e.g., privacy and security, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), accessible computing, and machine learning) as well as social sciences (e.g., anthropology, behavioral economics). I am also interested in policy issues around privacy. My research often involves an iterative design process that consists of studying users, building prototypes, and evaluating them empirically. I employ both qualitative and quantitative methods such as surveys, interviews, diary studies, ethnographic studies, experiments, server log analyses, Internet measurement studies and machine learning. I also design, build, and evaluate prototypes with lab or field experiments.

I have three main lines of research:

(1)Inclusive privacy and security: designing simple and effective mechanisms to support people with different backgrounds and characteristics to protect their privacy and security.
(2)Data-driven privacy and security: applying data-driven techniques (e.g., machine learning) to better understand or support privacy and security.
(3)Explainable AI: providing people easy-to-understand explanations of AI algorithms especially when these algorithms are used to make automated decisions that can affect individuals.






Last modified: Dec., 2018