Yousra Javed

	Associate Professor School of Information Technology Illinois State University Office: Old Union 304 Phone: +1 309-438-2804 Email: yjaved at ilstu dot edu
Background	I am an Associate Professor in the School of Information Technology at Illinois State University, and the mentor for ISUSec Cybersecurity student club. I completed my Ph.D. from the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. My research interests include Usable Security and Privacy, and the use of AI in Cybersecurity.
News	Received the School of IT Outstanding Research Award for 2025 Organized the 2025 Central Illinois High School Cyber Defense Competition (CIHSCDC) Led the establishment of Women in Cybersecurity student chapter at ISU Served on the Women in Technology panel at ISU Serving on the program committee of the 5th Forum for Women in Research (WIRF) 2025 Systematic review of privacy policy literature accepted in the ACM Computing Surveys Journal
Research	My primary research interests lie at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction, and Privacy and Security. This line of investigation focuses on addressing human factors of Cybersecurity and privacy, by leveraging a user-centered design of security and privacy technologies and using mixed methods to understand user behavior, perceptions, and comprehension as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of existing and proposed interventions/systems on a diverse population. I have investigated several case studies including authentication schemes, email access control/encryption tools, social networks, third-party applications, and voice assistants. Additionally, I am interested in designing security education and awareness materials, privacy policy analysis and compliance, and the use of AI in cyber security, privacy, and education. I am looking for students to assist me in my research projects. If you are interested, please apply at this link. Active Projects Usable Privacy and Security Texts: Exploring natural language processing techniques to help users understand security and privacy texts. CAPTCHA Design and Evaluation: Sector-wise Investigation of Strength and Accessibility of CAPTCHAs on South Asian Websites. Web accessibility improvement for students with disabilities. Transparency and readability analysis of AI health mobile apps' privacy policies. Eye-tracking for Security and Privacy: Exploting passive and active uses of eye-tracking to improve end-user security and privacy.
Recent Publications	See my CV or Google Scholar profile for a complete list of publications. Yousra Javed and Ayesha Sajid. A Systematic Review of Privacy Policy Literature. ACM Computing Surveys 2024. Ali Farooq, Laila Dahabiyeh, Yousra Javed. When WhatsApp changed its privacy policy: explaining WhatsApp discontinuation using an enablers-inhibitors' perspective. Online Information Review 2024
Teaching	Below are the courses that I commonly teach. IT 250: Fundamentals of Information Assurance and Security IT 351: Practical Cryptography and Trusted Systems IT 168: Structured Problem Solving Using The Computer
Graduate Students	Yunpeng Li - Quantitative Analysis of Universities' Privacy Statements Jay Dev - User Perceptions of DNA Data Privacy Navid Rajabi - IoT Botnet Traffic Classification using MLP-ANN Learning Algorithm Matthew West - Security Manual for Enabling Users Shashank Sethi - Chrome Extension for Understanding Website's Privacy Policy Akshay Singh Jadoun - User Understanding and Awareness of Alexa's Voice Recording Behavior Kunal Hemnani - Survey of Movie Recommender Systems Anagha Bhide - Enroller for Event Management
Undergraduate and High School Students	Saaketh Bhojanam - Privacy Policy Analysis of AI Health Apps Elyse Abadeer - ChatGPT Use and Implications in Various Sectors Caleb Howard - Privacy Policy Dataset Compilation Nicholas Spagnola - Security Analysis of WiFi Access Points Casey Johnson - CS vs Non-CS Students' Phishing Comprehension