Project | Intro to Usable Sec. and Priv. (Fall 2025)

Research Project

Due Dates

All submissions should occur via blackboard as a single PDF for each of the due dates above, this includes submitting your poster (as a PDF).

Assignment Descriptions

You will complete a semester long project related to usability security and privacy. If you are not a PhD student, you may work in groups of two (or individually, in rare cases, with permission of the instructor). If you are a PhD student, you are required to work individually. It is expected that all projects have a user study that can either be qualitative or quantitative in nature, but you may also do a measurement or large/mid-scale comparison instead, if it makes sense for your project.

Historically, these small class projects can develop into real research projects and publications, so if you are interested in this research area, this is a great opportunity to explore an area that you are excited about. At the bottom are some sample research projects, but you are not required to use any of these. You can propose your own idea, if you want.

At the end of this project you will have completed a small research project, provided a written description of the research, produced a poster presentation with Q&A.

Mentorship

Every project will be assigned mentor. Mentors will either be graduate students or postdoctoral scholars. In addition to feedback from your instructor, you should get feedback from them. The mentors will also participate in grading process for project poster presentations.

Projects Proposal

Your proposal should include the following information, approximately one paragraph per-point.

  1. What research questions/hypothesis do you plan to address?
  2. What methods will you use in your investigate?
  3. What is your recruitment plan and target demographic?
  4. What is a timeline for your work?
  5. What are the ethical considerations? (see below)
  6. What is your analysis plan for any data you collect?

Following submission of your proposal, your group will schedule meetings with the instructor and mentors to get feedback and provide updates before final approval of your topic and research plan.

Project Protocol and Ethics Report

As this research project is for the purpose of training and educating students on how to conduct research and not to produce generalized knowledge research results, it is the general standard that this research does not require an ethics review. However, that does not mean you can conduct research unethically.

You are required to submit a preliminary draft of your study methods/protocol along with a justification that it meets ethical standards of treating participants fairly. Your ethics and protocol report should include the following section prompts with appropriate responses. The entire report should be 2-3 pages, not included attachments.

We will also use these ethic reports to provide feedback on your protocol. The goal is to help you scope your work properly to something that can be completed as a class project.

Ethics and Protocol Report

Attachment

Project Status Meeting

While ungraded, we will conduct two meetings with mentors and instructor to check the status of your project. The first will occur shortly after your research protocol and ethics report, and the second will occur as you approach your poster presentation and final report.

Poster Presentation

Each team will generate and print a 48” x 24” (horizontally or vertically oriented) poster, which you will present as part of an end of term poster session. Your poster should be visual in nature (not too wordy!) but should also cover the topics below.

Do not forget to include good visuals of your result.

Printing your poster

You can print your poster for free through the GW library’s 3-D and Large Format Printing. There will be a special submission via a class project.

Note you may need to submit your poster well in advance of the poster session depending on the lead time of the library.

Project Final Report

Your final report should be between 6-8 pages, not including bibliography and appendix. It should be formatted as ACM, two column format. You can easily find this on overleaf. You should use the \documentclass[sigconf]{acmart} header for the two-column format.

Your paper should have the following outline (and descriptions):

Bibliography

You should make sure you cite at least 10 papers in your final report bibliography. These papers should be related to your topic. They can also overlap with papers you covered in your deep dive or other papers from the class. Most importantly, these articles should come from reputable sources, such as:

You may find papers outside of these venues, and you should check with the instructor if they are appropriate to use.

If your project overlaps with your deep dive, you are welcome to reuse those articles as part of your bibliography.

Resources

As this is a class project, you will likely rely on friends and family to be your research participants – or your class mates :) If you wnat, you can explore using paneling platforms like Prolific or Qualtrics, but this costs money to you. Alternatively, you can post your survey or requests to r/SampleSize subreddit which is a easy, but somewhat unreliable way to recruit participants for surveys. Crowdsourcing on twitter (X) or other social media is also a good choice.

If you are running a survey, you can use a number of free-ish survey platforms to host your survey. Many of these do have fees, but have a free version. This includes SurveyJS, LimeSurvey, Qualtrics, and, of course, Google Forms. Additionally, Microsoft also has forms through their Office 365 account that could be used to complete this project.

If you are conducting interviews, you may want to consider using audio transcription tools. However, I strongly caution against trusting these transcriptions completely and should check outputs for consistency. There are a number of products that link to Zoom and Google Meets to do transcriptions you can use, as well as a number of smartphone apps.

Grading

We will use the following grading scheme for all project grading schemes:

For project proposal, ethics review, and annotated bibliography, for grades at or below 95%, you can resubmit.

Posters

For this part of the project, you will be graded by at least three reviewers (made up of the mentors and instructor).

Final Report

For this part of the project, we will use the grading scheme applied to each expected portion of the report.

Project Topics

Below is a non-exhaustive list of topics and some general research questions that you can use to build a proposal. You may also propose your own topics. Note that you will need to develop your own more specific research question and methods of investigation for your research.