Deepak Kumar

Assistant Professor
University of California San Diego
kumarde@ucsd.edu

I study the security and digital safety threats that emerge when people interact with sociotechnical systems at scale. These days, I've been calling this subfield sociotechnical cybersecurity. I blend large-scale, data-driven measurements with human-centered studies to understand how such threats, which range from misinformation to online abuse, are operationalized in practice and how people experience them. Ultimately, my work contributes insights, data, defenses, and systems that seek to make the Internet a safer place for all people.

If you've come looking for my creative work, go here.

Students

I am always interested in working with motivated students on research. You can find a page that details my interests and what you can expect from me as an advisor here.

Teaching
Select Publications

PressProtect: Helping Journalists Navigate Social Media in the Face of Online Harassment
Best paper honorable mention!
Catherine Han, Anne Li, Deepak Kumar, Zakir Durumeric. ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), November 2024. [pdf]

Watch Your Language: Investigating Content Moderation with Large Language Models
Deepak Kumar, Yousef AbuHashem, Zakir Durumeric. AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), June 2024. [pdf]

Specious Sites: Tracking the Spread and Sway of Spurious News Stories at Scale
Hans Hanley, Deepak Kumar, Zakir Durumeric. IEEE Security & Privacy Symposium. May 2024. [pdf]

Hate Raids on Twitch: Echoes of the Past, New Modalities, and Implications for Platform Governance
Best paper award!
Catherine Han, Joseph Seering, Deepak Kumar, Jeff Hancock, Zakir Durumeric. Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW). Oct 2023. [pdf]

Understanding the Behaviors of Toxic Accounts on Reddit
Deepak Kumar, Jeff Hancock, Kurt Thomas, Zakir Durumeric. ACM Web Conference (WebConf). May 2023. [pdf]

Designing Toxic Content Classification for a Diversity of Perspectives
Deepak Kumar, Patrick Gage Kelley, Sunny Consolvo, Joshua Mason, Elie Bursztein, Zakir Durumeric, Kurt Thomas, Michael Bailey. USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). August 2021. [pdf]

SoK: Hate, Harassment, and the Changing Landscape of Online Abuse
Kurt Thomas, Devdatta Akhawe, Michael Bailey, Elie Bursztein, Dan Boneh, Sunny Consolvo, Nicki Dell, Zakir Durumeric, Patrick Gage Kelley, Deepak Kumar, Damon McCoy, Sarah Meiklejohn, Thomas Ristenpart, Gianluca Stringhini. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. May 2021. [pdf]