Dr. Madiha Tabassum is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Simmons University. Prior to joining Simmons, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University.
Education
- PhD: University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Area of Expertise
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Usable Security and Privacy, User Experience Research
Courses
CS 110 Foundations of Information Technology
Research and Special Projects
Project: Community Custodians – online moderation to fight hate and harassment against (at-risk) communities
Developing research agenda and conducting empirical research (public data analysis, interviews, etc.) to study (at-risk) community moderation to develop frameworks, tools (social, technological, and policy), and platform design guidelines to support online moderators in managing community safety.
Project: Collaboration toolbox to utilize cryptography for social good
Collaborating with cryptographers and HCI researchers to develop an interdisciplinary research agenda to characterize existing barriers to collaboration and design new approaches and tools to help facilitate communication between various stakeholders (e.g., end-user communities in need, usable security researchers, cryptographers, systems security experts, and developers).
Project: Investigating & designing for online security, privacy, and safety needs of neurodivergent people
Combining neurodiversity theory with qualitative and quantitative explorations of neurodivergent lived experience to construct, validate, and apply a design framework for inclusive design that accommodates and enables neurodivergent people’s goals in the area of security, privacy, and safety.
Publications
Madiha Tabassum, Alana Mackey, Ashley Schuett, and Ada Lerner. ”Investigating moderation challenges to combating hate and harassment: The case of mod-admin power dynamics and feature misuse on reddit.” In 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 24). USENIX Association. 2024.
Madiha Tabassum, Alana Mackey, and Ada Lerner. ”’Custodian of Online Communities’: How Moderator Mutual Support in Communities Help Fight Hate and Harassment Online.” In Twentieth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2024), pp. 297-314. 2024.
Madiha Tabassum, Heather Richter Lipford. “Exploring privacy implications of awareness and control mechanisms in smart home devices”, to Appear in the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, PoPETs (issue 1), 2023.
Akter, Mamtaj, Madiha Tabassum, Nazmus Sakib Miazi, Leena Alghamdi, Jess Kropczynski, Pamela J. Wisniewski, and Heather Lipford. “Evaluating the impact of community oversight for managing mobile privacy and security.” in the proceedings of the Nineteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2023), pp. 437-456. 2023.
Madiha Tabassum, Jess Kropczynski, Pamela Wisniewski, Heather Lipford. “Smart Home Beyond the Home: A Case for Community-Based Access Control”, in the proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), April, 2020.
Madiha Tabassum, Tomasz Kosinski, Heather Richter Lipford. “ ’I don’t own the data’: End User Perceptions of Smart Home Device Data Practices and Risks” in the proceedings of the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), August, 2019.
Madiha Tabassum, Tomasz Kosinski, Alisa Frik, Nathan Malkin, Primal Wijesekera, Serge Egelman, Heather Richter Lipford. “Investigating Users’ Preferences and Expectations for Always-Listening Voice Assistants”, in the proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, IMWUT (issue 4), 2019.
Madiha Tabassum, Abdulmajeed Alqhatani, Marran Aldossari, Heather Lipford. “Increasing User Attention with a Comic-based Policy”, in the proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), April, 2018.
Tyler Thomas, Madiha Tabassum, Bill Chu, Heather Lipford. “Security During Application Development: an Application Security Expert Perspective”, in the proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), April, 2018.
Madiha Tabassum, StaceyWatson, Bill Chu and Heather Richter Lipford. “Evaluating Two Methods for Integrating Secure Programming Education”, In the proceedings of the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, February 2018.
Julia Bernd, Serge Egelman, Maritza Johnson, Nathan Malkin, Franziska Roesner, Madiha Tabassum, and Primal Wijesekera. “Studying User Expectations about Data Collection and Use by In-Home Smart Devices”, Symposium on Applications of Contextual Integrity, 2018