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Laptop webcams can be covertly activated by malware and law enforcement agencies. Consequently, 59% percent of Americans manually cover their webcams to avoid being surveilled. However, manual covers are prone to human error–through a survey with 200 users, we found that over 60% occasionally forget to re-attach their cover after using their webcam. To address this problem, we developed Smart Webcam Cover (SWC): a thin film that covers the webcam by default, and automatically uncovers the webcam when its LED indicator is lit.

We developed a visual analytics system, VitaLITy, to promote serendipitous discovery of academic papers wherein users may “stumble upon” relevant literature, when other search approaches may fail. VitaLITy (1) utilizes transformer language models to help users find semantically similar papers given a list of seed paper(s) or a working abstract, (2) visualizes the embedding space in an interactive 2-D scatterplot, and (3) summarizes meta information about the paper corpus (e.g., keywords, co-authors, citation counts, and publication year).

Software-defined networks (SDNs) are managed by a central controller that typically uses a separate, out-of-band network for control traffic. We are working on an intercontinental SDN, the AtlanticWave/SDX, and a secondary network connection would be very costly, so we have designed an in-band network control solution, and have generalized it for other SDNs to use.