The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a four-year, $1.1 million grant to six Carnegie Mellon researchers who will develop technologies enabling people to more effectively control privacy and security options available in mobile and pervasive computing environments that range from cell phones to smart offices.

The project, funded under NSF's CyberTrust initiative brings together a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, including Norman Sadeh and Lorrie Cranor, associate professors in the School of Computer Science; Lujo Bauer, systems scientist in the university's Cyber Security Lab; Jason Hong, assistant professor of human-computer interaction; Bruce McLaren, systems scientist in the Human Computer Interaction Institute, and Mike Reiter, professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science.

The group will focus on three areas-developing novel user interfaces and supporting techniques to enhance their usability; integrating learning, dialogue and explanation technologies to make them easier for users to understand, and conducting field studies to evaluate combinations of what they develop in the context of the My Campus and Grey computing environments.

My Campus is a prototype environment developed by Sadeh to support pervasive computing applications that take advantage of users' contextual information, such as their locations, activities or social relations, subject to their privacy preferences. See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sadeh/mycampus.htm#Video.

The Grey project, initiated by Reiter and Bauer, looks at using cell phones to control access to both physical and virtual resources in any kind of pervasive computing environment. Grey includes support for delegating access rights among users, and is currently deployed on two floors of Carnegie Mellon's Collaborative Innovation Center.