Whether it’s a medical treatment for a loved one, an engineered solution to an everyday problem, or a means of including people in places they’ve previously been excluded from, science can open doors for all of us to thrive a society that grows more and more complicated every day. Dr. Krishna Venkatasubramanian, an Assistant Professor in our Computer Science and Statistics department, is one such scientist. “I specialize in research problems pertaining to cybersecurity, personal safety and wellbeing, and accessibility,” he said. “We explore the frontiers of research in computer science in our quest to build usable technologies for marginalized populations.” He recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support one such quest — specifically to research effective cybersecurity solutions for people with physical disabilities, focusing on upper extremity impairment (UEI). “A person affected by UEI is someone who lacks range of motion, strength, endurance, speed, and/or accuracy associated with movement in the shoulders, upper arms, forearms, hands, and fingers,” Venkatasubramanian explained. “Over 20 million people in the United States alone suffer from conditions that lead to UEI of some form.”
With the help of Ph.D. student Brittany Lewis, Venkatasubramanian is investigating ways that authentication solutions — the ways in which we access online materials through secure means — can work for people with UEI, fighting to combat the ableism displayed in building authentication technology. The NSF’s Security and Trustworthy Computing (SaTC) program awarded the project with a grant in the amount of $499,995 for three years. Venkatasubramanian and Lewis are collaborating with Cranston-based nonprofit TechAccess of Rhode Island, which helps people with disabilities adopt, learn, or use assistive technologies. As their research process commences, Lewis is interviewing people with UEI to find out more about how they use secure login now, as well as what works and what doesn’t work for them. The team will then develop a suite of authentication solutions called AssistiveAuth. According to Venkatasubramanian, the authentication solutions in the AssistiveAuth suite will minimize (if not eliminate) the user’s need to use their limbs. In addition, Venkatasubramanian explained, “they are based on behaviors that cannot easily be copied by people with intimate access to the user.”
“Unlike existing solutions that ask people with disabilities to learn to use a new assistive technology in order to authenticate,” Venkatasubramanian said, “our approach espouses the viewpoint of ability-based design where the authentication solution adapts to meet the needs/capabilities of the user rather than the other way around.” The strength of this approach is the inherent adaptability, as people with varying levels of UEI conditions — which can degenerate or improve over time — will be able to change their authentication as they change their assistive technologies and computing devices dependent on their needs at any given time.
As this project moves forward, Lewis and Venkatasubramanian urge everyone to look past the scientific jargon to the message at their research’s core. As Venkatasubramanian puts it: “Our world makes many assumptions about the abilities of the people who live in it. However, people with disabilities often do not fit these assumptions. It is important to remember that people with disabilities are not people who need to be ‘cured’ or ‘fixed’. Consequently, as engineers and scientists, our aim should be to make the world accessible to people with disabilities so that they can experience the world like everyone else. We should not expect people with disabilities to ‘live with’ what we build for them. The best way to do this is to include people with disabilities in the design process of new technologies designed for them.”
~Written by Chase Hoffman, Writing & Rhetoric and Anthropology Double Major, URI Class of 2021
