Kami Vaniea (van-yay)

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). My research interests are in the human factors of security and privacy. The goal of my work is to make security and privacy technologies more accessible for a wide range of users including end users, developers, and system administrators. My recent projects include: developer-centered privacy, dynamic phishing advice, smart speaker bystander privacy, understanding barriers to software update installation, and people's misunderstanding of Twitter's privacy settings.

I am currently:

• Head of the Technology Usability Lab In Privacy and Security (TULIPS)
• Member of the Security and Privacy group, which is in turn part of Edinburgh's Academic Center of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR)
• Member of the Institute for Language Cognition and Computation
• Associated with the Laboratory for Foundations for Computer Science
• Member of Design Informatics

I was previously a Lecturer/Reader in Cyber Security and Privacy at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. And before that, an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University and a post doctorial researcher in the Media and Information department at Michigan State University. My PhD is from Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department and my thesis looked at the human factors of access control systems.

Students

Current PhD Students

• Sara S. Albakry
• Nicole Meng-Schneider
• Amirah Alshamrani
• Duncan Reid
• Tarini Saka
• Temima Hrle

Past Students

A full list of past Masters, Undergraduate, and Intern students along with their projects can be found on the TULIPS Student Projects page.

• Florian Mathis
• Adam Jenkins
• Kholoud Althobaiti
• Mohammad Tahaei
• Dilara Kekulluoglu
• Andrew Faulds
• Yasmeen Rashidi

Teaching

• Human-Computer Interaction (past: 2019/2020, 2017/18)
• Usable Security and Privacy (past: 2018/19)

Past Teaching

• Computer Security
• I330: Legal and Social Aspects of Security
• I400/I590: Today's Privacy Challenges