Former Faculty Memebers

 

Yasemin Acar was a Research Group Leader at MPI-SP, where she focused on human factors in computer security. Her research centers humans, their comprehension, behaviors, wishes and needs. She aims to better understand how software can enhance users’ lives without putting their data at risk. Her recent focus has been on human factors in secure development, investigating how to help software developers implement secure software development practices. Her research has shown that working with developers on these issues can resolve problems before they ever affect end users. She was a visiting scholar at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in 2019, where she researched how users of smart homes want to have their security and privacy protected. She received the John Karat Usable Security and Privacy student Research Award for the community’s outstanding student in 2018. Her work has also been honored by the National Security Agency in their best cybersecurity paper competition 2016. She is currently a professor of computer science at Paderborn University in Germany.

 

Giulio Malavolta was a tenure-track faculty at MPI-SP. He is broadly interested in the theory of cryptography and its connections with quantum computation, concurrent systems, cryptocurrencies, and game theory. His recent work focuses on constructing cryptographic schemes with advanced functionalities and finding new applications to real-life systems.
Giulio was previously a postdoc with a joint appointment at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University. In fall 2019, he was a research fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He completed his Ph.D. in 2019 at Friedrich-Alexander University. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the department of Computing Sciences at Bocconi University.