Alex Lambert
November 2009: take a look at my profile from Microsoft!
In Spring 2009, I finished my BS at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I was part of the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering. I specialized in human-computer interaction and computer security. I'm a member of the Social Spaces research group, and my undergraduate thesis enabled secure communication through social networking services.
As a general philosophy, I'm doing the best I can until time travel has been perfected.
Here's a taste of what I've been working on:
- Waterhouse
Waterhouse makes exchanging secure (cryptographically-protected) e-mail easy. Waterhouse integrates with social networking services like Facebook to automatically discover friends' cryptographic keys.
Waterhouse will appear as a work-in-progress paper at CHI 2009 in Boston. The paper has details and screenshots. You can also find it at the ACM Digital Library.
- sblFood
sblFood is a social catalyst for the Siebel Center, the home of the Computer Science department at UIUC. It brings hungry students together through group food orders.
- Serendipity
Serendipity questions the benefits of search engines. In an insightful essay, "The End of Serendipity", journalism professor Ted Gup recalled his childhood fascination with the "wondrously whimsical and exquisitely inefficient" encyclopedia. He confesses his discomfort with search engines' precision and suggests that they "[smother] the opportunity to find what may well be the more important answers — the ones to questions that have not yet even occurred to us."
Gup proposed a solution called "Serendipity"; I implemented it as a Firefox extension.
- the Perfect Web Search Engine
The Perfect Web Search Engine is the search engine that no one would ever use. I created and implemented it for Yahoo's University Hack Day in October 2008.
Give it a shot and then read about the lesson it teaches.
- Telescreen
Telescreen explores privacy issues raised by the Facebook Platform. Telescreen lets a user browse Facebook from the perspective of a third-party application. Telescreen displays everything that a Facebook application can see.
Telescreen started as a final project for a social visualization course; it became my thesis before I built Waterhouse. The final report has screenshots and details.
- mod_authn_myproxy, an Apache authentication module
During the summer of 2006, I worked in the Security R&D group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I designed, wrote, and documented mod_authn_myproxy, an Apache module to authenticate users against the MyProxy credential management service. The module was released under an open-source license.