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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

I'm a professor at Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), School of Computer Science (SCS), at Carnegie Mellon University. Nickname is my name (unimaginative, I know). My research is on usable privacy and security, ubiquitous computing, location-based services, and mobile social computing.

Here are some highlights of my past and ongoing work:

• I'm a co-author of The Design of Sites, a popular book on web design patterns.


• I'm a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies. We create software to train people about computer security in a manner that is fun, effective, and measurable. Our products include micro-games for cyber security awareness, just-in-time training through simulated phishing attacks, and a cloud-based Security Training Platform that offers ongoing training and assessment in a range of computer security issues. These products are based on our research on anti-phishing, published in Scientific American.


• In 2012, I published an article in the Communcations of the ACM entitled The State of Phishing Attacks


• Our team has developed Livehoods. We gathered a bunch of geotagged social media data (Foursquare, in this case) and applied a number of clustering algorithms to understand the nature, character, and structure of neighborhoods. Our work on Livehoods has been featured in the Wall Street Journal blog, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, New York Post, MIT Tech Review, The Atlantic Cities, and more.


• Our team has also been analyzing smartphone apps for privacy issues. This work has been featured in CBS Morning Show, New York Times, Salon, New York Daily News, MIT Tech Review, and more.


• I help run the Pervasive Computing subreddit, which is a mix of news, videos, and academic research on mobile, pervasive, and ubiquitous computing
  

Odds and ends: Was once a phone-a-friend for Who Wants to be a Millionaire. What color are the sands in the Kalahari desert?