Ben Zhao

Ben Zhao joined the Computer Science department at UCSB in 2004, where his research topics include security and privacy, overlay networks, distributed systems and wireless networks. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2004, and his BS from Yale in 1997. He received the NSF Career award in 2005, the MIT Tech Review TR-35 Innovator award in 2006, and the ComputerWorld Top 40 IT Innovator award in 2007. Ben has been studying attacks on reputation systems for Internet communities such as auction systems. Recently he has been developing reliable and practical anonymous communication systems. His recent projects include privacy controls for social networks such as Facebook, and is performing large-scale graph mining on social network datasets.

• Swamynathan, G., Wilson, C., Boe, B., Almeroth, K.C., & Zhao, B.Y. (forthcoming). Do Social Networks Improve e-Commerce? A Study on Social Marketplaces. To be presented at the First Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN) at ACM SIGCOMM 2008. [ download swamynathan, et al.pdf]