This week staff and students from both Security & Privacy in Informatics, Computing, and Engineering center and Pro Health attended Indianapolis’ Gencon 51 at the Indy Convention Center. Gencon is a four-day gaming convention. It is both the oldest and largest gaming convention in the world. This year’s event had 60,000 visitors filling the exhibitors hall. Multiple floors of gaming rooms and 500 vendor booths will support a well-educated and creative community who are both well versed and interested in computer technology.

Recognizing the outreach opportunity that Gencon presents, our team went with the goals of raising recognition for the work our centers as well as to recruit newstudents and study participants. In previous years, the SPICE team has made hundreds of contacts and passed out thousands of promotional materials over the space of the four-day conference.

This year’s planned effort involved using SPICE’s Internet of Things house and its research toys as a draw for attendees attention.  As the Internet of Things (IoT) House’s Project Manager, Joshua Streiff, explained:

People understand their homes, their spaces, and their families.  They also understand cute toys, like Cloudpets’ Unicorns. We put three on our pole of shame to get people to initiate conversations about what the toys were and why we study them with our students so that we can talk about all the system, policy, and usability research we do at our IoT House lab.

The unicorn pole was highly effective as a conversation piece.  In addition to children, teens and parents stopped to talk to our representatives.

An interestingly large number of people had heard of the unicorns, but the vast majority had not.  We were able to demonstrate a simple threat model, talk about mitigation techniques even with small children, and the reasons why further studies and research are vital for the safety of all.

Our joint presence ran for the full length of the event with students from SPICE as well as Ethos House and Pro Health. Rotating our volunteers allows for both promotional time while also getting the opportunity to move about the rooms and floors enjoying the event. This also allowed for continuing conversations throughout the halls.

The IoT House research lab is located on Park Ave just west of Informatics West and is a part of a five year NSF grant exploring the Internet of Things and held in partnership with the University of Washington.  A vital part of SPICE’s interdisciplinary research is focussed on both system security and usability. Having a research lab that is a repurposed home in which testing and studies can be performed provides a unique educational environment for students as well enabling maximal impact on both industry and society.  

We look forward to continuing the conversations that began at Gencon into the future.