teaching

This course aims to give students a solid understanding of the most common types of attacks used in cybercrime and cyberwarfare. Taught by a long-time cybersecurity practitioner, a recovering cyberlaw litigator, and a group of hearty, motivated TAs, each session will begin with a lecture covering the basics of an area of technology and how that technology has been misused in the past. Students will then complete a lab section, with the guidance of the instructor and assistants, where they attack a known insecure system using techniques and tools seen in the field. Each week, there will be a second lecture on the legal and policy impacts of the technologies and techniques we cover. By the end of the course, students are expected to have a basic understanding of some of the most common offensive techniques in use today as well as a comprehensive overview of the most important aspects of cyberpolicy and law. No computer science background is required. All students must have access to a Windows, Mac OS X or Linux laptop.

This course will focus on advanced research on social media with an emphasis on interpersonal dynamics. The course will emphasize key theories from psychology and communication that bear on behavior and social media. Students will develop a research project in the course that draws on one of the primary methods from the social media space.

In this course we develop a model of how language reflects social and psychological dynamics in social media and other technologically-mediated contexts. The course lays out the main stages of analyzing language to understand social dynamics, including using theory to identify key discourse features, feature extraction, and classification and prediction. The course will draw on action-oriented language approaches to understand how people use language (e.g., grounding and joint action models), and then build on this approach to understand how discourse features from natural language can be used to answer questions from a wide range of social science questions, and ultimately, to the design of new technologies.

An introduction to the ways consumer internet services are abused to cause real human harm and the potential operational, product and engineering responses. Students will learn about spam, fraud, account takeovers, the use of social media by terrorists, misinformation, child exploitation, harassment, bullying and self-harm. This will include studying both the technical and sociological roots of these harms and the ways various online providers have responded.

There are many ways in which the internet is abused to cause human harm. Terrorists use social media for recruitment. Government trolls harass opposition politicians and mass report activist accounts for supposed platform violations. Foreign and domestic actors post videos full of disinformation. Chat apps are used to incite violence. This course will explore political science research on these topics and how online platforms currently respond to these threats. Students will gain an understanding of the most pressing challenges in global communication platforms and a strong foundation for future research and work on mitigating these harms. For the final project, students in this class will partner with students in " CS152: Trust and Safety Engineering" to design policy guidelines to respond to harmful content in a particular country that the CS students will implement as a working bot. No programming skills are needed to enroll in "The Politics of Internet Abuse". Content note: This class will cover real-world harmful behaviors (such as hate speech, harassment and child exploitation) and will expose students to potentially upsetting material.

Our world is being transformed by media technologies that change how we interact with one another and perceived the world around us. These changes are all rooted in communication practices, and their consequences touch on almost all aspects of life. In COMM 1 we will examine the effects of media technologies on psychological life, on industry, and on communities local and global through theorizing and demonstrations and critiques of a wide range of communication products and services.

This course is a practical introduction to online open source investigation — internet research using free and publicly available information. The course will cover domain investigations, social media research, image verification, and research into cryptocurrency transactions. The goal of the course is to prepare students for online open source research in jobs in the public sector, with technology companies, human rights organizations, and other research and advocacy groups.