Christo Wilson Christo Wilson Research Students Funding Service Algorithm Audits Publications Press Teaching Current Semester CS 4700/CS 5700 - Network Fundamentals Past Semesters After-hours Command Line Basics CY 2550 - Foundations of Cybersecurity CS 3700 - Networks and Distributed Systems CS 5600 - Computer Systems IS 4700/CS 5750 - Social Computing CS 4740/CS 6740 - Network Security FAQs Lab Resources and Services HDFS and Spark Gnuplot Reference I am a Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. I am a member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute and the Associate Dean of Academic Programs and Student Experience in Khoury College. I am a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and an affiliate member of the Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity at Northeastern University School of Law. My research seeks to investigate the sociotechnical systems that shape our lives using a multi-disciplinary approach. I believe that by increasing transparency we can also improve accountability of these systems. If you're interested in my research, here is a quick primer on web privacy, here is a brief video about algorithm auditing, here is a longer video about our investigation of bias in hiring algorithms, and here is a video discussing the role of algorithm auditing in AI regulation. Along with my co-PIs, I am currently working to launch the National Internet Observatory. This NSF-funded project seeks to gather data about the online habits of a large, representative panel of US residents and then make it available to qualified researchers around the world. News June 2024: I am honored to report that I have been promoted to Full Professor! Thank you to all my students, collaborates, and colleagues who have helped me reach this milestone. May 2024: Congrats to Desheng, Jeffrey, and Aziz: their paper examining the market for online search received an Honorable Mention Award at ICWSM 2024 (one of three total awards given at the conference)! Our group has received paper awards at ICWSM for two year running! November 2023: We have two papers accepted to appear at ICWSM 2024: one focusing on different conceptualizations of Google's power in the market for search engines, and one focused on offensive and defensive brand advertising on search engines. Camera ready copies will be posted soon. Congrats to all the authors! These papers represent the culmination of collaborations stretching across computer science, law, and business. June 2023: Congrats to Jeffrey Gleason, whose ICWSM paper "Google the Gatekeeper" received a Best Paper award! May 2023: Huge congrats to Dr. Ronald E. Robertson and all our co-authors on our new Nature paper. We examine how people engage with partisan and unreliable news, and find that Google Search is not creating filter bubbles: Google tends to show diverse news sources to all people, but partisans choose to follow links and visit websites that align with their political beliefs. May 2023: The co-plaintiffs and our excellent lawyers on the Sandvig v. Barr lawsuit were honored to receive the Outstanding Applied or Public Research Award from the International Communication Association (ICA)! The award recognizes our efforts to protect Internet researchers from the chilling effect of prosecution from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). April 2023: I was honored to present the 59th Robert D. Klein Lecture at Northeastern, which is given each year by a member of the teaching faculty who has contributed with distinction to his or her field of study. March 2023: Congrats to Jeffrey Gleason on his first first-author publication, accepted to ICWSM 2023! More details on this research and the camera ready will be available in May. February 2023: Johanna Gunawan's work on dark patterns has been cited by the OECD, in new regulations supporting the Colorado Privacy Act, and in testimony from the Center for Democracy & Technology before the US House. November 2022: Big congrats to James Larisch and the rest of Team PKI for winning a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at CCS 2022 for Hammurabi! Our system moves the PKI forward by cleanly separating TLS certificate parsing mechanisms from validation policy, allowing TLS clients to easily adopt and modify sophisticated validation policies. Hammurabi makes it easy to, for example, make Firefox behave like Chrome! November 2021: I gave remarks about how algorithm auditing can increase transparency and accountability during a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy panel. The full discussion can be viewed here. October 2021: It's official: David Lazer, David Choffnes, and I have been awarded $15.7 million from the NSF to build a large-scale observatory of human and algorithmic behavior online. This is a massive, five year project, and the ultimate goal is to build a platform that provides unprecedented data about online life to a wide variety of researchers in a safe, ethical way. September 2021: It's been a long time coming: our first paper on deceptive user interface dark patterns is out in CSCW. This paper does a cross-modality comparison of dark patterns across mobile apps, mobile websites, and desktop websites, and finds problematic cases where services offer essential features in some modalities but not others. We've also got a new website specifically focused on our dark patterns research. June 2021: The Supreme Court has ruled in the Van Buren v. US case that terms of service (ToS) violations are not CFAA violations. The ruling cites our case, Sandvig v. Barr, and our amicus brief. I am elated that SCOTUS has largely lifted the cloud of uncertainty surrounding the CFAA and ToS violations, and humbled that our own efforts played a teensy tiny part in the resolution of this case. May 2021: I am excited to finally have a paper at SIGIR! Avijit's new research examines the use of inferred demographic features an input to fair ranking algorithms, and finds, unfortunately, that errors in inference completely undermine the fairness guarantees of these systems. Our results highlight that there is no free lunch when it comes to building fair systems: high-quality ground-truth data is key. February 2021: In association we the Anti Defamation League, and researchers from Dartmouth and Exeter, we've published our first report on hate speech and anti-semitism on YouTube. We don't find strong evidence for recommendation-driven "rabbit holes" that lead ordinary people to extremist content, but we do observe a small and highly motivated community that watches a lot of hateful content on YouTube. Our results point to the need for stronger baseline standards of content moderation on YouTube. February 2021: The lead story on MIT Tech Review is about our audit of pymetrics. The corresponding paper is available here. Great quotes from some some of my favorite law/policy scholars, Frank Pasquale and Pauline Kim. December 2020: I'm excited to announce that we have a new paper accepted to FAccT (formerly FAT*) 2021. This paper presents the results of a collaborative algorithm audit where we critically examined the fair machine learning pipeline used by recruiting startup pymetrics. The paper is available here. July 2020: My co-plaintiffs and I on Sandvig v. Barr have filed an amicus brief in the Van Buren v. US case that will be argued before the US Supreme Court. Like Sandvig, Van Buren concerns the limits of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The ACM have also filed an amicus brief that cites our research to motivate why the court should move to narrowly interpret the CFAA. March 2020: I am elated to announce that the court has ruled in our favor in our lawsuit against the Department of Justice regarding the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Here's the full opinion, and press from the ACLU. TL;DR, the court found that terms of service violations are not CFAA violations, which is amazing! March 2020: Congrats to Shan on his accepted ICWSM 2020 paper entitled "Modeling and Measuring Expressed (Dis)belief in (Mis)information". There is a wealth of literature on the spread of misinfo on social media, but this paper takes a more nuanced dive, asking whether people actually believe this content. Turns out, things are complicated! The camera ready should be available in April. August 2019: It is always a bittersweet day for an advisor when their PhD students defend. A huge congrats to Dr. Muhammad Ahmad Bashir for defending his thesis, entitled "On the Privacy Implications of Real Time Bidding". Ahmad will be starting a post-doc this fall with Serge Egelman in Berkeley. July 2019: Congrats to Ahmad in his accepted IMC 2019 paper entitled "A Longitudinal Analysis of the ads.txt Standard". This is the first paper to look at the adoption and impact of the new ads.txt transparency protocol. Paper available here. June 2019: I am excited and honored to be a 2019-2020 Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. I'm looking forward to spending my sabbatical working on cross-cutting research at the intersection of computer science and public policy. June 2019: I am excited and honored to be a 2019-2020 Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. I'm looking forward to spending my sabbatical working on cross-cutting research at the intersection of computer science and public policy. June 2019: Shan and Ron's paper, "Bias Misperceived: The Role of Partisanship and Misinformation in YouTube Comment Moderation", is the winner of a well-deserved Outstanding Analysis award at ICWSM 2019! April 2019: Khoury College has been selected as one of the phase 1 winners of the Mozilla Foundation's Responsible Computer Science Challenge! This fall I'll be working with Ronald Sandler and John Basl to develop new ethics teaching materials and weave them throughout our undergraduate classes. March 2019: I am thrilled and honored to receive the 2019 Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award from Northeastern! February 2019: I am deeply honored and humbled to be named a 2019 Sloan Fellow. Thank you to all my collaborators and students who made this possible! December 2018: Congrats to Ahmad for winning best student paper at the Future of Privacy Forum's Annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers Awards! These papers are summarized and distributed directly to policymakers in Washington. We are humbled and honored by this distinction. December 2018: Our IMC 2017 paper on the abysmal state of DNSSEC support by registrars was awarded one of the 2019 Applied Networking Research Prizes from the IRTF and the Internet Society. Congrats to the whole team! November 2018: Congrats to Ahmad, Umar, and Maryam, on their accepted paper at NDSS 2019. This work presents the first large-scale study of the "interests" that ad networks infer about online users. Key takeaway: these interests are often wrong, and ads are being mis-targeted to uninterested people. November 2018: Ron's CSCW 2018 paper on partisan bias in Google Search results received an Honorable Mention award! October 2018: Congrats to John and Shan on their new FAT* paper that critically examines the A/B experiments that websites routinely run on their users, without their knowledge. August 2018: Two CSCW papers accepted this year! Congrats to Ron and Shan on their papers. I'm very proud to say that this represents my first accepted paper that is full of emoji, which is an important professional milestone 😉 July 2018: Two IMC papers accepted this year! Congrats to TJ and Team PKI on their new paper "Is the Web Ready for OCSP Must Staple?", and to Ahmad on the conference version of his paper "How Tracking Companies Circumvented Ad Blockers Using WebSockets". July 2018: Fun video, in which I warn Molly Callahan from News@Northeastern that she will starve if she tries to live on Bitcoin for a day. June 2018: Achievement: unlocked. I a…