Press Release and 
podcast -- Yahoo Answers users seek advice, opinion, as well as expertise in research by Mark Ackerman, Lada Adamic and STIET fellow Eytan Bakshy Press Release -- Bluffing in prediction markets research by Rahul Sami and STIET fellow, Stanko Dimitrov
Podcast discussing the STIET research program with Jeff MacKie-Mason and Tom Finholt
STIET video showing lifesize, uncompressed fiber-optic video conference from UM Atkins room to WSU via OptIPortalNicolas Christin
Associate Director and Faculty, Information Networking Institute and Systems Scientist, CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University
4-5:30
WSU: 313 State Hall (transportation will be available from UM--contact stiet-info@umich.edu)
UM: 1202 SI North (via videoconference))
Security interactions in networked systems, and the associated user choices, due to their complexity, are notoriously difficult to predict, and sometimes even harder to rationalize. We argue that users often underestimate the strong mutual dependence between their security strategies and the economic environment (e.g., threat model) in which these choices are made and evaluated. This misunderstanding weakens the effectiveness of users' security investments. We study how economic agents invest into security in different economic environments, which are characteristic of different threat models. We notably explore Nash equilibrium predictions for the environments considered, contrast them with social optima, and map out an experimental research agenda for further investigation of user behavior.
Recommended reading:
Jens Grossklags, Nicolas Christin, and John Chuang. Secure or Insure? A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Information Security Games. In Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'08), pages 209-218. Beijing, China. April 2008. http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/GCC-WWW08.pdf
Optional reading:
Jens Grossklags, Nicolas Christin, and John Chuang. Security and Insurance Management in Networks with Heterogeneous Agents. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'08), pages 160-169. Chicago, IL. July 2008. http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/GCC-EC08.pdf
Nicolas Christin is the Associate Director of the Information Networking Institute, where he also serves as a faculty member. He is in addition a CyLab Systems Scientist, and a faculty advisor for a number of technical masters programs. He spends much of his time in the CyLab’s research and education center in Japan, CyLab Japan, located in Kōbe.
Christin’s research interests are in computer and information systems networks; most of his work is at the boundary of systems and policy research, with a definitive slant toward security aspects. He focuses on network security and its economics, security and psychology, incentive-compatible network topology design, and information flow security.
He holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, and a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from École Centrale de Lille. http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/
