Muhammad Haroon

I'm a graduate student in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis advised by Professor Magdalena Wojcieszak. My research interests involve the privacy, societal, and safety implications of online algorithmic systems.

News

2024  Oct Invited to attend the MPK Meta Research Day at their Menlo Park HQ.
2024  Sep Presented at Trust & Safety Research Conference at Stanford University.
2024  May Awarded the GGCS Research Fellowship ($18,000) for Summer 2024.
2023  Sep Attended the Trust & Safety Research Conference at Stanford University.
2023  Sep Attended the third annual ProperData Symposium at Northeastern University.
2023  Jun Awarded the GGCS Research Fellowship ($18,000) for Summer 2023.
2023  Jun Auditing YouTube's Recommendation System for Ideologically Congenial, Extreme, and Problematic Recommendations was accepted in PNAS.
2023  Mar Awarded the GGCS Research Fellowship ($7,177) for Spring 2023.
2022  Dec Launched Nothing to Hide? A Data Privacy Podcast.
2022  Dec Attended the second annual ProperData Symposium at UC Irvine.
2022  Nov Attended the UC Noyce Initiative Symposium '22 at UC Santa Barbara.
2022  Oct Presented at the UC Davis Noyce Workshop.
2022  Aug Research featured in the UC Davis College of Engineering News.
2022  Jun Presented at the Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) conference at Harvard University.
2022  Jun Participated and presented at the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) at the University of Pennsylvania.
2022  Jun Attended the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media '22 (ICWSM) in Atlanta.
2022  May Attended the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy '22 (Oakland) in San Francisco.
2021  Nov Attended the ProperData Symposium at UC Irvine.
2021  Oct HARPO: Learning to Subvert Online Behavioral Advertising was accepted at NDSS'22.
2021  Mar Left TPI lab and joined the PhD program at UC Davis.
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Publications

Nudging the Recommendation Algorithm Increases News Consumption and Diversity on YouTube

Xudong Yu Muhammad Haroon Ericka Menchen-Trevino Magdalena Wojcieszak

PNAS Nexus, 2024

pre-print website

Auditing YouTube's Recommendation System for Ideologically Congenial, Extreme, and Problematic Recommendations

Muhammad Haroon Magdalena Wojcieszak Anshuman Chhabra Xin Liu Prasant Mohapatra Zubair Shafiq

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2023

paper website

HARPO: Learning to Subvert Online Behavioral Advertising

Jiang Zhang Konstantinos Psounis Muhammad Haroon Zubair Shafiq

The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2022

paper code

Avengers Ensemble! Improving Transferability of Authorship Obfuscation

Muhammad Haroon Fareed Zaffar Padmini Srinivasan Zubair Shafiq

arXiv pre-print, 2021

paper code

Talks + Podcasts

User or Algorithm? Investigating what drives congenial consumption on YouTube

Communication Horizons Conference, UC Davis, 2024

slides

YouTube, The Great Radicalizer?

Politics and Computational Social Science Conference (PaCSS), Harvard University
Summer Institute in Computation Social Science (SICSS), University of Pennsylvania, 2022

slides

How Social Media Algorithms Can Foster Political Radicalization

The Backdrop - A UC Davis Podcast, 2022

listen read

Offensive Privacy to Counter AdTech Surveillance

Nothing to Hide - A Data Privacy Podcast, 2022

listen