Christo Wilson
Affiliate Faculty
Christo Wilson is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, a founding member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, and director of the Bachelor of Science cybersecurity program. He serves as an affiliate member of the Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity at Northeastern University School of Law and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Wilson centers his research around online security and privacy. He places particular emphasis on the emerging field of algorithmic auditing. His interdisciplinary approach uses experimental techniques to measure the black-box algorithmic systems that pervade daily life to increase the transparency and accountability of these systems.
Several prominent organizations including, the National Science Foundation, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Mozilla Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the Data Transparency Lab, the European Commission, Google, Pymetrics, and Verisign Labs have supported Wilson’s work.
He is the recipient of Best Paper Awards from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Data Communications, Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, and the International Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM). He has earned the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Cybersecurity Award for Innovation, the Internet Research Task Force/Internet Society Applied Networking Research Prize, and a Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award from the Future of Privacy Forum.
Wilson’s work has also garnered press attention from Good Morning America, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and others. He serves on the executive committee for the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency and the program committees for conferences including ICWSM, IEEE Security and Privacy, and the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.
He earned his doctoral, master’s, and bachelor’s degrees in computer science from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Awards & Affiliations: 2019 Sloan Fellow; Core Member, Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, Northeastern University; Faculty Associate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University; Affiliate, Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity, Northeastern University School of Law.