UW professors on the grand challenge of mitigating tech security, privacy and safety risks
lazowska · x · 2026-10-29
A University of Washington Allen School Q&A with professors Franziska Roesner (co-director of the Security and Privacy Research Lab) and Sewoong Oh (differential privacy and robust ML) on computing's "grand challenge": mitigating security, privacy and safety risks of emerging technologies.
Key points:
- The security mindset asks not "how do we make it faster and more featureful?" but "how might someone misuse it? What happens with unexpected inputs? What assumptions did we bake in?"
- Security, privacy and safety are human questions: understanding actual social, societal and personal context matters greatly.
- Their cross-campus collaborations aim to build safer, privacy-preserving technologies that better serve people and society.
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