John Chuang

John Chuang is Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. His research and teaching span the areas of climate informatics, biosensory computing, and incentive-centered design. He leads the BioSENSE Lab in studying brainwave authentication using passthoughts, affective biosensing, embodied decision-making, and privacy of ubiquitous sensing. His earlier work investigated strategic cybersecurity investments, incentives for peer production, and scalability of multicast trees. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and graduated summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Links: Publications ·  Google Scholar · CV

Selected Recent Publications

Social Distancing and Social Biosensing: Intersubjectivity from Afar
M. Curran, J. Chuang. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, July 2022.

Neural Dynamics of a Single Human with Long-Term, High Temporal Density Electroencephalography
J. Chuang. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC’21), November 2021.

Active Dynamical Prospection: Modeling Sensorimotor Control during Pathfinding via Particle-based Mental Simulation
J. Gordon, J. Chuang. Proceedings of Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2021), July 2021.

Covert Embodied Choice: Decision-Making and the Limits of Privacy Under Biometric Surveillance
J. Gordon, M. Curran, J. Chuang, C Cheshire. Proceedings of ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021), May 2021.

Sensing is Believing: What People Think Biosensors Can Reveal About Thoughts and Feelings
N. Merrill, J. Chuang, C. Cheshire. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2019), June 2019.

Understanding Digitally-Mediated Empathy: An Exploration of Visual, Narrative, and Biosensory Informational Cues
M. Curran, J. Gordon, L. Lin, P.K. Sridhar, J. Chuang. Proceedings of ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019), May 2019.

One-Step, Three-Factor Passthought Authentication with Custom-Fit, In-Ear EEG
N. Merrill, M. Curran, S. Gandhi, J. Chuang. Frontiers in Neuroscience, April 2019.

Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives
N. Howell, J. Chuang, A. De Kosnik, G. Niemeyer, K. Ryokai. PACM on Human-Computer Interaction, November 2018. (CSCW 2018)

Faking it, Making it: Fooling and Improving Brain-Based Authentication with Generative Adversarial Networks
T. Piplani, N. Merrill, J. Chuang. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications, and Systems (BTAS 2018), October 2018.

When BCIs have APIs: Design Fictions of Everyday Brain-Computer Interface Adoption
R. Wong, N. Merrill, J. Chuang. ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2018), June 2018.
Best Paper Honorable Mention Award

A Window into the Soul: Biosensing in Public
E. Sedenberg, R. Wong, J. Chuang. In Surveillance, Privacy and Public Spaces, by Newell, Timan, Koops (eds.), Routledge, March 2018.

Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks
R. Wong, D. Mulligan, E. Van Wyk, J. Pierce, J. Chuang. PACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 1, No. 2, Article 111, November 2017. (CSCW 2018 Online First)
Best Paper Award

Given Enough Eyeballs, All Bugs are Shallow? Revisiting Eric Raymond with Bug Bounty Programs
T. Maillart, M. Zhao, J. Grossklags, J. Chuang. Journal of Cybersecurity, October 2017.

Recent Teaching

INFO 206A Introduction to Programming and Computation
INFO 206B Introduction to Data Structures and Analytics
INFO 290 Biosensory Computing
INFO 290 Climate, People, Informatics
INFO 234 Information Technology Economics, Strategy, and Policy
INFO 295 Doctoral Colloquium

Datasets and Software

Synchronized Brainwave Recordings from a Group Presented with a Common Audio-Visual Stimulus
John Chuang, Nicholas Merrill, Thomas Maillart, and Students of the UC Berkeley Spring 2015 MIDS Immersion Class, May 2015.
Available on: Kaggle

Synchronized Brainwave Recordings from a Group Presented with a Common Visual Stimulus
John Chuang, Nicholas Merrill, Thomas Maillart, and Students of the UC Berkeley Fall 2014 INFO290 Class, March 2015.

PhD Students and Postdocs

Ando Shah (current PhD student)
Jeremy Gordon (current PhD student)
Max Curran (PhD 2020; Facebook)
Elaine Sedenberg (PhD 2019; co-advised with Deirdre Mulligan; Facebook)
Nick Merrill (PhD 2018; UC Berkeley)
Ashwin Mathew (PhD 2014; co-advised with Coye Cheshire; King's College London)
Melissa Densmore (PhD 2012; co-advised with AnnaLee Saxenian; University of Cape Town)
Jens Grossklags (PhD 2009; Technical University of Munich)
Paul Laskowski (PhD 2009; UC Berkeley)
Michal Feldman (PhD 2005; Tel-Aviv University)

Thomas Maillart (Postdoc 2013-2017; University of Geneva)
Timo Smura (Postdoc 2012-2013; Verto Analytics)
Benjamin Johnson (Postdoc 2009-2011 and 2013-2014; TU Munich)
Moshe Babaioff (Postdoc 2005-2007; Microsoft Research)
Sonja Buchegger (Postdoc 2004-2006; KTH, Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm)
Pedro Ferreira (Postdoc 2004-2005; Carnegie Mellon University)
Ahsan Habib (Postdoc 2003-2005; Telenav)
Nicolas Christin (Postdoc 2003-2005; Carnegie Mellon University)

Trivia

• I am as old as the first commercial microprocessor, the first e-mail, the first computer worm, and the P versus NP problem.
• I worked for Jerry Yang when we were both at Stanford. His job title back then was head TA for EE271 (not yet Chief Yahoo), and I was one of his lowly graders.
• You can find one of my earliest works in the collection of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institute.
• If you visit my office, you will see this photo autographed by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, presented to my dad for his contributions to Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling. The aircraft is across the National Mall, retired in the National Air and Space Museum. In his retirement, my dad is now a foliage artist.
• The Chuang Sirbu Scaling Law is named for my work on scaling properties of multicast trees.
• Through my former PhD student Michal, I have an Erdős Number of 3. Furthermore, the Erdős-Alon-Feldman-Chuang subgraph has a min-cut of 4.
• Thanks to my appearance in the documentary Click, I have an Bacon Number of 3, with paths connecting to Kevin Bacon via either Al Gore or Steven Spielberg. Therefore, I have an Erdős-Bacon number of 6, tying, among others, Richard Feynman.
• My colleagues and I have been credited for coining the term "p2p whitewashing attack" in 2003.
• I gave a talk in 2005 right before Sergey Brin spoke about Search, Google, and Life, except his helicopter couldn't find a place to land (or something like that), and so he missed my talk on Peer-to-Peer Search.
• Doug Engelbart came to my class in 2007 to demonstrate his original mouse.
• You are welcome to find out what I chose for my first passthought.
• I recently started on my academic genealogy project. I learned that my great-great-grand-advisor invented the world's first biomedical prosthetic device.