School of Information May 2018 Commencement

Keynote Speaker: Joseph Lorenzo Hall

Joseph Lorenzo Hall is the chief technologist and director of the Internet Architecture project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington, DC-based non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to ensuring digital rights and that the internet remains open, innovative and free. Hall's work focuses on the intersection of technology, law, and policy, working to ensure that technical considerations are appropriately embedded into legal and policy instruments.  Supporting work across all of CDT's programmatic areas, Hall provides substantive technical expertise to CDT's programs, and interfaces externally with CDT supporters, stakeholders, academics, and technologists. Hall leads CDT's Internet Architecture project, which focuses on embedding human rights values into core internet standards and infrastructure, engaging technologists in policy work, producing accessible technical material for policymakers, and specific lines of work associated with reducing chilling effects to security research and the cybersecurity of voting technologies.

Prior to joining CDT in 2012, Hall was a postdoctoral research fellow with Helen Nissenbaum at New York University, Ed Felten at Princeton University, and Deirdre Mulligan at University of California, Berkeley. Hall received his Ph.D. in information systems from the UC Berkeley School of Information in 2008. His Ph.D. thesis used electronic voting as a critical case study in digital government transparency. In his postdoctoral work, he worked on implementing risk-limiting audits for digital elections, developing techniques to increase the efficiency and usability of accountability mechanisms in election auditing. Hall holds master's degrees in astrophysics and information systems from UC Berkeley and was a founding member of the National Science Foundation's ACCURATE Center (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections). He has served as an expert on independent teams invited by the States of California, Ohio, and Maryland to analyze legal, privacy, security, usability, and economic aspects of voting systems. Hall is the vice-chairman of the Board of Directors of the California Voter Foundation, a member of the Board of Directors of the Verified Voting Foundation and a member of technical advisory boards to the Electronic Registration Information Center and Los Angeles County's Voting System Assessment Project. In 2012, Hall received the John Gideon Memorial Award from the Election Verification Network for contributions to election verification. In 2017, Hall was part of a team that received the Researcher Award at the 2017 O'Reilly Security Defender Awards in recognition of the team's dedication and innovative contributions to election security for organizing the first Voting Machine Hacking Village at DEFCON 25.