FYI

Best Regards, Ishtiaque

Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of Toronto, ON, CA Ph: +1 647 220 3482 Skype: syed.ishtiaque.ahmed web: https://www.ishtiaque.net/ My Availability: Google Calendar Link https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ishtiaque.uoft%40gmail.com&ctz=America%2FToronto

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Laura Boudreau l.boudreau@columbia.edu Date: Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 2:35 PM Subject: CS-HCI PhD Students who may be interested in a project on secure survey design To: Ishtiaque Ahmed ishtiaque@cs.toronto.edu Cc: soden@cs.toronto.edu

Dear Ishtiaque and Robert,

I hope that you are well. I am reaching out in relation to a project that I'm working on with a collaborator on secure (fully anonymous) survey design in organizations. Currently, we're working in relation to COVID, but the ideas are more broadly applicable. The basic idea for COVID is that organizations can adopt indirect survey methods that provide plausible deniability to encourage their employees to report COVID exposure and to take sick leave, while minimizing the chance that employees face stigma from coworkers or managers due to the possibility that they have COVID-19.

Given the urgency around COVID, we are writing a policy-oriented article for the Harvard Business Review that we hope will persuade some organizations to adopt this type of policy. We want to accompany the article with a website and a set of implementation tools (public goods) that organizations can use to implement the policy. We plan to use Jekyll and to host the website on github. As of now, we have a very simple set of instructions and templates available on our websites (here http://laura-boudreau.com/policy-other-writings/).

We'd love to collaborate with a motivated CS phd student with interest in the design of secure information transmission systems for use, for example, in the aforementioned context as well as in whistleblowing and other similar systems. Ideally, this person would also have strong coding skills.

Does anyone come to mind for either of you? If not, do you have any suggestions on faculty or departments whose students may be interested in this type of research?

Thanks and best,

Laura