Sepideh Ghanavati

Assistant Professor

School Computing and Information Science

University of Maine

Orono, ME, USA

Phone: +1 (207) 581-3218

Email: sepideh[dot]ghanavati[at]maine.edu

About

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 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.

For more more about me, check out my Academic CV or About Me page.

Prospective students interested to join PERC_Lab, please check here as well as read through Norms and Policy document.

Find my PGP public key here.

Publication Index

[Google Scholar]   [DBLP]    [IEEE XPlore]

Research Interests

  • Mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) Privacy and Security
  • Usable Privacy
  • Natural Language Understanding
  • Programming Comprehension (Code Summarization/Generation)
  • Privacy by Design
  • Regulatory Compliance Software Engineering
  • Requirements Engineering

Recent News

03/21/2024

Our paper "Requirements Satisfiability with In-Context Learning" at the RE'2024 conference.

12/3-9/2023

Vijayanta Jain attended FSE for showcasing our Demonstration Paper.

11/22/2023

Dr. Ghanavati gave a guest lecture in the Information Privacy Law at UMaine School of Law.

11/20/2023

Dr. Ghanavati gave an invited talk at York University in Toronto, Canada.

11/16-17/2023

Dr. Ghanavati attended Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI) in Washington DC.

11/01/2023

Congratulations to Wilder Baldwin for receiving CUGR Fellowship.

10/20/2023

Dr. Ghanavati and Zack Delile attended UMaine Board Of Visitors/ Integration of Research and Teaching Panel.

09/04/2023

Dr. Ghanavati gave a keynote "Privacy is not an Afterthought: Raising Awareness Towards Privacy-Driven Software Development" at ESPRE'23 in Hannover, Germany.

07/20/2023

Our paper "A Language Model of Java Methods with Train/Test Deduplication" has been accepted for Demonstration at ESEC/FSE 2023.

07/05/2023

Vijayanta Jain presented our paper "Towards Fine-Grained Localization of Privacy Behaviors" at Euro S&P 2023.

04/03/2023

Vijayanta Jain and Sepideh Ghanavati gave a Tech Talk at Google.

03/09/2023

"Ghanavati awarded $674,804 from NSF to study data privacy", UMaine News.