Urs Hengartner

Professor Urs Hengartner completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon in August 2005. Prior to that, He received an M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and a Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH from ETH Zürich.

His research is in information privacy and computer and networks security with a focus on security and privacy challenges that arise in the context of smartphones, mobile applications, and IoT. He studies the use of machine learning for securing or attacking devices and services. An example is implicit user authentication, where a smartphone continuously authenticates the user based on their behaviour and context. Urs also works on privacy-preserving technologies for location-based services and mobile applications that protect users from having to share personal information with service and application providers. He also worked on privacy-preserving location verification technologies, genomic privacy, and end-to-end voter-verifiable voting systems.