Sepideh Ghanavati
Assistant Professor
School Computing and Information Science
University of Maine
Orono, ME
Phone: +1 (207) 581-3218
Email: sepideh[dot]ghanavati[at]maine.edu
About Me
I am an assistant professor in Computer Science at the School of Computing and Information Science (SCIS) at the University of Maine and the director of the Privacy Engineering - Regulatory Compliance Lab (PERC_Lab). I received the 2023 NSF CAREER Award.
My research interests are in the areas of information privacy and security, privacy by design, software engineering, and programming comprehension. I apply my research to several applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Android, and iOS applications. The interdisciplinary nature of this research requires me to employ a variety of research methods, including requirements and software engineering, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, and empirical human studies.
I am the recipient of the Google Faculty Research Award in 2018 and Google’s Privacy-related Faculty Award in 2021.
Find my PGP public key here. a
Research Interests
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Mobile and Software Privacy and Security
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Privacy and Security for the Internet of Things (IoT)
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Usable Privacy
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Natural Language Understanding
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Code Summarization and Code Generation
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Regulatory Compliance Software Engineering
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Privacy by Design and Privacy Requirements Analysis
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(Goal-Oriented) Requirements Engineering
Publication Index
[Google Scholar] [DLBP] [IEEE Xplore]
PhD, MSc. and Undergraduate Students
I am accepting highly motivated PhD, MSc. and BSc. students interested in privacy and security research in my research group, Privacy Engineering - Regulatory Compliance Lab (PERC). Prospective students need to have strong programming knowledge as well as good knowledge in NLP and deep learning. Please check the Projects page for information on the available projects.
Recent News
03/09/2023
"Ghanavati awarded $674,804 from NSF to study data privacy", UMaine News.
03/04/2023
Our paper, Understanding Developers Privacy Concerns Through Reddit Thread Analysis, got accepted at NLP4RE'23 Workshop.
01/25/2023
We have new members at PERC_Lab. Welcome to our group: Kenzie Young, Joe Godinez, Hannah Kleine, Garrette Engstrom, and Sean Radel.
12/09/2022
Vijayanta Jain successfully defended his thesis proposal. Congratulations to our new Ph.D. Candidate.
09/01/2022
We have a new member at PERC_Lab. Welcome to our group: Sara Haghighi.
06/01/2022
Dr. Ghanavati won the UMaine Summer Fellowship award.
05/17/2022
We presented our work at ACM WiSec 2022.
03/17/2022
Our paper, PAcT: Detecting and Classifying Privacy Behavior of Android Applications, has been accepted at WiSec 2022.
03/10/2022
Congratulations to Stephen Kaplan and Max Prybylo for receiving CUGR Summer Fellowship and MSGC Summer fellowship awards.
