PhD students Ramazan Yener, Eryue Xu, and Mubarak Raji presented their research this week at the 2026 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR) in Santa Clara, California. PEPR is focused on designing and building products and systems with privacy and respect for their users and the societies in which they operate. The students received USENIX grants covering their conference registration and providing travel support to attend the conference.
Xu presented "Vision: Human-as-the Unit Privacy Management with AI Agents." Her talk presented research from the CHI 2026 paper she coauthored with Tianshi Li (Northeastern University), which investigates how autonomous AI agents can improve user privacy controls.
Raji presented "Enforcement of Data Protection Laws in Africa: Implications for Privacy Engineers." He shared study results and analysis of the enforcement of data protection laws implemented in 44 African Union countries.
Yener presented "Mapping the Privacy Workforce in the AI Era," which examines the field of privacy professionals and how these job descriptions are defined across major hiring platforms. Researchers for this paper include PhD student Muhammad Hassan and Associate Professor Masooda Bashir.
At the conference, Bashir served as room captain for a session on secure machine learning combined with multi-party computation.
