Sepideh Ghanavati
Associate Professor
School Computing and Information Science
University of Maine
Orono, ME, USA
Phone: +1 (207) 581-3218
Email: sepideh[dot]ghanavati[at]maine.edu
About
I am an associate professor in Computer Science at the School of Computing and Information Science (SCIS) at the University of Maine and the director of the Privacy Engineering - Regulatory Compliance Lab (PERC_Lab). I am also the faculty affiliate of the Canadian-American Center and a researcher at the University of Maine Artificial Intelligence Initiative (UMaine AI) center. I received 2023 NSF CAREER Award.
My research interests are in the areas of information privacy and security, privacy by design, software engineering, and programming comprehension. I apply my research to several applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Android, and iOS applications. The interdisciplinary nature of this research requires me to employ a variety of research methods, including requirements and software engineering, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, and empirical human studies.
I am the recipient of the Google Faculty Research Award in 2018 and Google’s Privacy-related Faculty Award in 2021.
For more more about me, check out my Academic CV or About Me page.
Prospective students interested to join PERC_Lab, please check here as well as read through Norms and Policy document. Note that interest in privacy-related topics is a key. Currently, I am not actively recruiting new students. However, I will always look for exceptional candidates that have a research background that matches my research interests.
Find my PGP public key here.
Publication Index
[Google Scholar] [DBLP] [IEEE XPlore]
Research Interests
- Mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) Privacy and Security
- Usable Privacy
- Natural Language Understanding
- Programming Comprehension (Code Summarization/Generation)
- Privacy by Design
- Regulatory Compliance Software Engineering
- Requirements Engineering
Recent News
09/17/2025
Dr. Ghanavati attended the US Congressional Visit Day to advocate for Science.
08/25/2025
Congratulations to Sara Haghighi for successfully defending her thesis proposal!
06/16/2025
"Ghanavati awarded $310,00 from NSF to study policies for interactive dialogue systems.
06/02/2025
Our paper “Generating Privacy Stories From Software Documentation” got accepted at RENext!'25.
05/21/2025
Dr. Ghanavati participated in CPDP.ai panel.
05/01/2025
Dr. Ghanavati is selected as the Program Co-Chair of RE'26, in Montreal, Canada.
05/05/2025
Congratulations to Ersilda Cako, David Geng, Clark LaChance, Shreyash Parajuli, Shashank Reddy, and Ryan Shanz for graduating with BSc. at UMaine.
01/06/2025
Dr. Ghanavati gave a talk at Dagstuhl Seminar 25021 titled, "NLP/ML Perspective on Privacy Documents".
12/09/2024
Congratulations to Wilder Baldwin for receiving MSGC Graduate Fellowships for "Privacy Stories: Inferring and Generating Privacy Design Solutions Pre-Development" project.
06/28/2024
Our paper “Requirements Satisfiability with In-Context Learning” won RE24 Challenge Award for Research Track.
06/25-26/2024
My collaborators and I presented three papers at RE'24 Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland.
06/04/2024
Vijayanta Jain and Sepideh Ghanavati presented our work "Identifying Privacy Behaviors in Android Application Source Code" at Google ASAP Research Seminar.
05/14/2024
Our paper "Evaluating Privacy Perceptions, Experience, and Behavior of Software Development Teams" has been accepted at the SOUPS'2024.