Women's Spotlight
Kathryn Fisler
Associate Professor
I'm a computer scientist because I love the combination of rigor and interactivity that computing provides. I started college as a math major, and took a required intro computer science course during freshman year. I didn't really get programming, and took the second course because I couldn't stand not being able to get that pile of metal on my desk to do seemingly simple tasks. Part way through that second course, programming started to click and I realized that I enjoyed it more than math because when I was stuck on a math problem, the paper and I would stare each other down, whereas at least the computer would crash or produce some weird output. Being both a lover of puzzles and (at the time) rather shy, knowing I could just keep experimenting with solutions and getting some feedback from the machine drew me into a computer science major.
As a researcher, I am still drawn to problems that integrate the rigorous logic needed to communicate with computers with human styles of logical expression. My doctoral dissertation created a formal logic of the various diagrams and textual notations that hardware engineers use to describe systems; in theory, this enabled engineers to check whether multiple diagrams about different aspects of a system were consistent with one another. More recently, I've been working on techniques to help people author and understand access-control policies that are used in software systems and web-based applications. An online homework submission system, for example, allows certain students (TAs or team members) to view files submitted by other students. The system needs a policy indicating who should be allowed to perform what actions on various kinds of files. These policies are hard to get right, and often must be written by non-computer experts. My current work looks at how people articulate privacy in the rigorous terms required by software and exploits that to create user-friendly tools for writing policies.
I'm interested in projects on a range of issues, including digital privacy, software-mediated access-control, how people gain confidence in computing systems, and developing techniques and tools to find errors in computing systems. I love teaching, especially intro programming courses. Computers are an amazingly flexible medium for creating new tools and I would like to see all students have a core appreciation of how to exploit computing in their favorite domains.
Maintained by webmaster@wpi.eduLast modified: March 06, 2008 09:59:18