Emerging smart devices, such as smart home appliances and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) systems, have enabled immersive interactions with users. For many users, however, it is intimidating when devices engage in perceived “mind-reading,” often without explicit consent. Such concern is not over-exaggerated, as users’ interactions with these devices expose numerous attributes about users’ physiological, psychological, and environmental traits that must be kept private. To tackle this challenge, I have presented user-centric solutions to empower privacy-preserving interactions with these devices.
In this talk, I will introduce techniques to make privacy more controllable in smart devices and help users control their privacy better. I will first present a user-facing privacy control layer designed to protect real-time eye tracking, a critical interaction modality for AR/VR. Next, I will present my research on how smart home users think of and react to privacy issues, which further inform privacy-preserving designs and practices. The talk will motivate the presentation of my future plan to systematically provide privacy support for users in the forthcoming interactive and interconnected world. Research website: https://www.jingjieli.me/
Jingjie Li is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jingjie’s research spans privacy, security, and human-centered systems broadly. His research aims to develop user-centric solutions that seamlessly integrate privacy into users’ interactions with emerging smart devices, including smart home, AR, and VR systems. He published impactful work at premier conferences in security and privacy (IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, and ACM CCS). His interdisciplinary work also received multiple best paper and design contest awards, including an ACM CHI Best Paper Award and an IEEE Micro Top Pick. Jingjie’s research led to an award from Meta for AR/VR privacy, and he has been recognized as a Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Rising Star by the NSF CPS program. He was an invited panelist at the US Federal Trade Commission’s PrivacyCon 2022.
Before joining UW-Madison, Jingjie obtained a Bachelor’s degree with first-class honors from the Australian National University in 2017.