A paper co-authored by PhD student Muhammad Hassan and Associate Professor Masooda Bashir received the Distinguished Paper Award at the Workshop on Security and Privacy in Standardized IoT, which was held last month in San Diego, California, in conjunction with the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026.
The paper, "Insights from GitHub Community on the Matter Standard: Developer Perspectives and Challenges," focuses on the practical experiences of developers navigating emerging smart home IoT standards. Research collaborators include Carl Gunter, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, and Susan Landau, professor of cybersecurity and policy at Tufts University.
"This research highlights the everyday challenges engineers face when building and integrating smart home devices," explained lead author Hassan. "It explores how issues of interoperability, reliability, and security stem not only from technical specifications but also from documentation, tools, organizational processes, and collaboration across different organizations."
Hassan's research focuses on enhancing the safety and usability of smart health and medical devices. His work particularly emphasizes how emerging IoT standards can be integrated to improve smart health care technologies. Bashir conducts interdisciplinary research spanning computer science, information science, and the social sciences to examine digital trust, cybersecurity, data privacy, and human-centered AI, with a focus on how people interact with and make decisions about emerging technologies.