Younes Karimi

I am an Informatics Ph.D. candidate at the College of Information Sciences and Technology of the Penn State University, and my research falls at the intersection of privacy, cybersecurity, and natural language processing. I mainly work with Prof. Anna Squicciarini and Prof. Shomir Wilson, and I am part of the Privacy in Social Computing lab and the Human Language Technologies Lab. My current research is primarily focused on the study of extremist groups such as ISIS to identify their techniques and strategies for the dissemination of propaganda messages on online social networks (OSNs) such as Twitter, manipulating online communities, inspiring and influencing people, recruiting new members and sympathizers, and gaining support around the world. I also work on the privacy of OSNs in which I use Machine Learning–based approaches for timely and automated detection of malicious disclosures of private information in Twitter and Reddit.

Previously, I was a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the State University of New York at Albany for three years. I was mainly working on a DARPA project to detect and defend NASA JPL employees (as well as other government employees) against phishing, spear phishing, and social engineering attacks in different communication channels such as Email, SMS, and LinkedIn. Besides, I conducted research on online user reviews of Google Play Store Android applications and customer reviews of Amazon products to identify their privacy and security aspects and corresponding user opinions, concerns and complaints. I also studied conformance testing of access control models, security and access control inference of web applications, and privacy of mobile applications.

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