Want to Join DIG ?

You’ve seen headlines like: "Company Accused of Firing Over Facebook Post"; "Are Facebook ads outing gay users?", and "The Age of No Privacy". Where does information go on the Internet? Who uses it, and for what purposes?

At CSAIL’s Decentralized Information Group (DIG), we’re interested in how information on the Web is used (or misused).  We build tools to help address the technical and social complexity of world that is increasingly awash in information. Examples include respecting personal privacy in social networks, sharing information among government agencies, and drawing valid results from online databases. We’re aiming to create a World Wide Web that is “Policy-aware”, where information is accompanied by rules that govern its use, and where automated reasoners detect if the use of the data complies with the rules. We use techniques from Linked Data (Semantic Web), automated reasoning, and parsing rules. Some particular challenges are (1)  Expressing policies in machine-readable form (2) Extracting and combining information from independent sources (like your Facebook page, your Flickr page, and your Tweets) (3) Building automated reasoners that continue working when rules and facts change, and are even contradictory (3) Expressing real policies, such as actual laws, in ways that the information can be interpreted by machines.

If you'd like to work on these kinds of research problems, send email to Amy and come talk to us. We are interested in working with students at all levels, UROP, MEng or PhD. Please see our current UROP opportunities.

New to DIG ?

For students who've just joined DIG, we recommend that you do the following

• Get a CSAIL account, if you don't already have one
• Speak to Amy about your paperwork, to find out where you should sit, and to get added to relevant mailing lists
• Ask our senior students about how to access our code repositories
• Attend weekly DIG Seminar currently scheduled on Thursdays from 11am -12pm.
• Read the following papers
  • The Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler and Ora Lassila, Scientific American, 2001
  • Information Accountability Daniel Weitzner, Hal Abelson, Tim Berners-Lee, Joan Feigenbaum, Jim Hendler, and Gerald Sussman, Communications of the ACM, 2008
  • Access Control is an Inadequate Framework for Privacy Protection Lalana Kagal, and Hal Abelson, W3C Privacy Workshop, 2010
• Look through some of our recent papers and projects
• Make a FOAF page for yourself

Leaving DIG ?

Once you've completed your project/thesis and are getting ready to leave DIG/graduate, please do the following

• Make sure that at least one other person in the group can run your code
• Send Amy the links to your thesis/project report, to your demo, and your code repository
• Return any MIT equipment you might be using
• Make sure Amy has your contact information and let her know if you want to be taken off the mailing lists