Jason Hong's Confabulations

The spring course schedules are now posted and I wanted to bring to everyone's attention a new course that Jason Hong, Mike Reiter, and Lorrie Cranor will be teaching this spring: 17-750/5-899A Usable Privacy and Security. This will be a 9 unit course offered T/Th 9-10:20am. Here's the description... There is growing recognition that technology alone will not provide all of the solutions to security and privacy problems. Human factors play an important role in these areas, and it is important for security and privacy experts to have an understanding of how people will interact with the systems they develop. This course is designed to introduce students to a variety of usability and user interface problems related to privacy and security and to give them experience in designing studies aimed at helping to evaluate usability issues in security and privacy systems. The course is suitable both for students interested in privacy and security who would like to learn more about usabil...

In his book Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century , Neil Postman actually has the only good argument I've ever seen for teaching Creationism alongside Evolution in classrooms. The story told by creationists is also a theory. That a theory has its origins in a religious metaphor or belief is irrelevant. Not only was Newton a religious mystic but his conception of the universe as a kind of mechanical clock contructed and set in motion by God is about as religious an idea as you can find. What is relevant is the question, To what extent does a theory meet scientific criteria of validity? The dispite between evolutionists and creation scientists offers textbook writers and teachers a wonderful opportunity to provide students with insights into the philosophy and methods of science. After all, what students really need to know is not whether this or that theory is to believed, but how scientists judge the merit of a theory. Suppose students were taught the criteri...

FYI, there's another ubicomp course being taught at UC Irvine this semester. Interesting seeing what similarities and differences there are here. Wish I could see their reading list, though. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~lopes/teaching/ubicomp/index.html

I'm teaching a grad-level course on ubiquitous computing. http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/courses/ubicomp-f2004/index.html Instructor: Jason Hong (Office NSH3613, send email to jasonh at cs cmu edu) Times: MW 9-10:30 Place: NSH 3002 Course#: 05899 Pre-requisites: This class is a combination of topics covering a wide variety of disciplines that impact ubiquitous computing. These include human-computer interaction, distributed systems, databases, machine learning, security, sensors, with a touch of public policy. While there is no explicit set of pre-requisite courses for this course, the more of a basic introduction you have to these various disciplines, the more you will get out of the class (in other words, you are not expected to be experts i...