Christo Wilson

Professor, Associate Dean of Academic Programs and Student Experience

Christo Wilson
  • Digital consumer protection
  • Online tracking and privacy
  • Deceptive user interfaces ("dark patterns")
  • Algorithm auditing
  • Empirical antitrust investigations of tech platforms
  • Tech platforms' compliance with data privacy and consumer protection laws
  • PhD in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • MS in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • BS in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara

Christo Wilson is a professor and the associate dean of academic programs and student experience in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston.

A founding member of Northeastern's Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, Wilson researches a wide range of digital consumer protection topics using measurement-driven approaches. This includes areas like online tracking and privacy, deceptive dark pattern user interfaces, misinformation and radicalization, fairness and bias in machine learning, algorithm auditing, empirical antitrust investigations of tech platforms, and compliance with online privacy laws.

Wilson is co-principal investigator of the National Internet Observatory, an NSF-funded project that gathers data about the online habits of a large, representative panel of US residents. The Observatory makes this data available to qualified researchers around the world.

Wilson's research has earned widespread recognition, including best paper awards at SIGCOMM, NDSS, and ICWSM, as well as honorable mentions at CHI and CSCW. His work has been covered extensively in the press, including by the CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. Wilson's work is supported by the National Science Foundation, a 2019 Sloan Fellowship, the Mozilla Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the Anti-Defamation League, the Data Transparency Lab, the European Commission, Google, Pymetrics, Northwestern University, Underwriters Laboratories, the Motorola Foundation, and Verisign Labs.

Wilson is a member of several academic communities. In 2018, he served as co-general chair of the inaugural ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), and he served on the conference's executive committee. He regularly serves on the program committees for conferences such as IMC, WWW, ICWSM, and PETS.

  • Hammurabi: A Framework for Pluggable, Logic-based X.509 Certificate Validation Policies

    Citation: James Larisch, Waqar Aqeel, Michael Lum, Yaelle Goldschlag, Kasra Torshizi, Leah Kannan, Yujie Wang, Taejoong Chung, Dave Levin, Bruce M. Maggs, Alan Mislove, Bryan Parno, and Christo Wilson. (2022). "Hammurabi: A Framework for Pluggable, Logic-Based X.509 Certificate Validation Policies". In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’22), November 7–11, 2022, Los Angeles, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3548606.3560594

  • A Comparative Study of Dark Patterns Across Mobile and Web Modalities

    Citation: Johanna Gunawan, Amogh Pradeep, David Choffnes, Woodrow Hartzog, and Christo Wilson. "A Comparative Study of Dark Patterns Across Mobile and Web Modalities". Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), October, 2021. DOI: 10.1145/3479521

  • When Fair Ranking Meets Uncertain Inference

    Citation: Avijit Ghosh, Ritam Dutt, and Christo Wilson. "When Fair Ranking Meets Uncertain Inference". In Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2021). Virtual Event, Canada, July, 2021. DOI: 10.1145/3506803

  • Building and Auditing Fair Algorithms: A Case Study in Candidate Screening

    Citation: Christo Wilson, Avijit Ghosh, Shan Jiang, Alan Mislove, Lewis Baker, Janelle Szary, Kelly Trindel, and Frida Polli. "Building and Auditing Fair Algorithms: A Case Study in Candidate Screening." In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2021). Virtual Event, Canada, March, 2021. DOI: 10.1145/3442188.3445928

  • Modeling and Measuring Expressed (Dis)belief in (Mis)information

    Citation: Shan Jiang, Miriam Metzger, Andrew Flanagin, and Christo Wilson. "Modeling and Measuring Expressed (Dis)belief in (Mis)information". In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2020). Atlanta, Georgia, June, 2020.

  • A Longitudinal Analysis of the ads.txt Standard

    Citation: Muhammad Ahmad Bashir, Sajjad Arshad, Engin Kirda, William K. Robertson, Christo Wilson. (2019). A Longitudinal Analysis of the ads.txt Standard Internet Measurement Conference, 294-307. https://doi.org/10.1145/3355369.3355603

  • Auditing the Personalization and Composition of Politically-Related Search Engine Results Pages

    Citation: Ronald E. Robertson, David Lazer, and Christo Wilson. 2018. Auditing the Personalization and Composition of Politically-Related Search Engine Results Pages. In Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference (WWW '18). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, CHE, 955–965. DOI: 10.1145/3178876.3186143

Related news

Explore all news

Current PhD students

Previous PhD students

  • Muhammad Ali

    PhD Student

  • Le Chen

    PhD Student

  • Avijit Ghosh

    PhD Student

  • Johanna Gunawan

    PhD Student

  • Shan Jiang

    PhD Student