I'm Steve.

I'm currently a research fellow at UC Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) and deputy director of CLTC's Citizen Clinic, a public-interest cybersecurity clinic that supports the capacity of politically-vulnerable organizations to defend themselves against online threats. In general, I study how technology can assist us in addressing challenges affecting the world's disadvantaged populations while we also protect privacy and human rights through value-sensitive design and effective regulation.

User Researcher

From rural Myanmar and Afghanistan to urban India and the United States, I've learned from people around the world to uncover how to best support them through security, development, and governance initiatives for the last decade. I've conducted qualititative research efforts to explore the challenges of healthcare in developing countries, disabilities among college students, perspectives on privacy in U.S. cities, consumer behavior of the rural poor, and underground armed resistance training and recruitment.

Program Manager

I've successfully managed multi-cultural teams through action-oriented leadership - including over 10 years of expertise within the U.S. Special Operations community leading others in the most challenging environments and critical situations around the world. I further enable my teams by developing both training programs and software tools to allow them to efficiently analyze large amounts of data and meet critical deadlines.

Policy Advocate

As a board member of Secure Justice and former fellow at the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy, I explore the broad impact of technologies on the tensions between national security and human rights or civil liberties, including working alongside members of the Oakland Police Department, Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission, and advocacy organizations to promote effective ways to understand impact of surveillance technologies upon their citizens.

Recent Projects

Here are some recent projects I've worked on
from smart accessible windows to bulk email classification:

  • Citizen Clinic

    The Citizen Clinic is a public-interest cybersecurity clinic at UC Berkeley. It supports the capacity of politically-vulnerable organizations to defend themselves against online threats. Building off our recent research on the ecosystem providing technical assistance to civil society, the clinic supports interdisciplinary teams of students to assess threats to targeted organizations, recommend risk-appropriate mitigations, and to work collaboratively with clients to implement new policies and technical controls that enhance their cybersecurity.

    Citizen Clinic

  • Matri-Raksha

    We supported the development work of One Heart Worldwide in Nepal by designing an information collection and storage service that takes into account the technological limitations of this context and supports the monitoring, evaluation and learning needs of OHW. Our team worked with members of OHW and their partners through a participatory design process to facilitate daily, weekly, and monthly reports from OHW-trained skilled birth attendants and community members, located across 13 remote districts working in over 180 birth centers to support over 26,000 pregnant women.

    Matri-Raksha

  • The Bay Area Surveillance Project

    My team explored the use of various technologies and assessment frameworks to enable local privacy protection and surveillance governance efforts. These efforts included developing an interactive educational resource, an agenda-tracking Twitter bot, and a collaborative application of the NIST privacy engineering framework to assess a law enforcement information-sharing system.

  • Hope Assist

    Hope Assist is a system designed to enable General Practioners in Pakistan to better diagnose mental health illnesses by providing recommendations based on WHO mhGAP guidelines. As a member of the 6-person effort, I designed the underlying information architecture. We won a grant from the UC Berkeley Big Ideas competition and the Human Rights Award from the Psychiatry Innovation Lab.

    Hope Assist team

  • B.E.C.C.A.

    My team used natural language processing and machine learning techniques on Hillary Clinton’s State-released emails to extract important people, topics and tone and visualize them in a graph database (Neo4J). The database was built using Python and various NLP & ML libraries while I built the web application with Node.js using popoto.js and grapheneDB.

    B.E.C.C.A.

  • WinDo

    WinDo is a first-of-its-kind smart home device that can retrofit double-hung windows. Its intelligent design allow users to open their windows in ways most convenient for them through multiple interfaces including a touch panel, physical buttons, voice and mobile app. I led the human-centered design process focused on mobility-limited users and designed & implemented the main control unit and UIs.

  • EveryoneGuitar

    Ever want to learn how to play the guitar? As part of a team assignment for Interactive Device Design, we made this musical instrument to demonstrate a fun way to convert analog sensor data (acceleration and pressure) into a MIDI input device. My responsibility was the software - integrating the sensor readings and converting them into meaningful MIDI messages.







  • TetraTetris

    My first adventure in HCI! As part of a research team at the University of Arizona, I helped develop TetraTetris, a work whose goal was to explore the possible applications and limitations of the DiamondTouch table produced by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL). TetraTetris was accepted for presentation and publication at INTERACT 2003, the Ninth IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction held on September 1-5, 2003.

Want to know more?

Ask for my resume or read about my military service.

Want to work together?

I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to send me a message via email, LinkedIn, or Twitter.