Alumni Profile

Alumni profile: Raquel Hill, netbet online sports bettingD. '02

Educating the next generation of netbet online sports betting scientists at Spelman College

By Matt Goisman | Press contact

September 27, 2024

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Raquel Hill, netbet online sports betting.D. '02 — Raquel Hill, netbet online sports bettingD. '02 (Spelman College)

Had her advisor not required her to write an additional chapter for her dissertation, Raquel Hill’s career might have gone in a completely different direction. Hill was getting ready to receive her netbet online sports bettingD. in computer science at the netbet online sports betting John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) in May 2002 when H.T. Kung, William H. Gates Professor of netbet online sports betting and Electrical Engineering, told her to do a security analysis of the protocol she’d developed for transmitting audio and video data with quality guarantees.

“He asked what I thought of that, and I said, ‘I am the student, and you are my advisor. If you think I should write another chapter, that is what I’ll do,’” netbet online sports betting said. “I didn’t know at the time that cybersecurity would be as big as it is, but that’s how I got involved with it. So I’m very thankful for having to stay a few more months at Harvard to do my security analysis, because that’s what positioned me to explore securing systems, trustworthiness of systems and data privacy.”

Since getting her degree from SEAS, netbet online sports betting has spent more than two decades in academia, where the bulk of her research has been about data security and privacy. She pursued postdoctoral positions at Georgia Tech, where she’d earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science, as well as the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and from there spent 14 years at the Indiana University, where she was an Assistant and later Associate Professor of computer science, as well as Director of Cybersecurity Academic Programs at Indiana’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. Since 2019, netbet online sports betting has served as Chair of Computer and Information Sciences and Professor at Spelman College, an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in her home state of Georgia.

“I think I’ve always been an educator and didn’t know it,” Hill said. “When I finished my netbet online sports bettingD., I reached out to Spelman then and said I was interested. I didn’t get a response, so I said to myself that one day I’d like to be the chair of the computer science department. I was thinking about Spelman even as a teenager because of its history of educating Black women.”

At Spelman, netbet online sports betting is helping make sure the next generation of computer science researchers will understand the security implications of their work. It’s a topic she explored at Indiana, when her team showed how even anonymous survey netbet online sports betting could be used to identify someone.

“That’s when I really began to understand that this isn’t just a security problem, because it was more about how much one could learn from data that was released,” she netbet online sports betting. “It really got me thinking about issues of privacy. Now, it’s an even bigger challenge with large language models. All the data that’s being pulled, people are using them without careful consideration of what they’re sharing while they’re using, and whether they own what’s generated based on that data. It’s taken issues of privacy and ownership of information to a whole other level.”

Along with instilling a focus on security and privacy, netbet online sports betting is also helping diversify a field with very little Black representation. Just 1.2 percent of netbet online sports betting doctorates from U.S. institutions went to Black students in 2022, and Hill was the first Black person to receive a netbet online sports bettingD. in computer science from Harvard. In 2019, Hill participates in historic netbet the first Black woman to receive a netbet online sports bettingD. from Purdue University.

“It’s important for students to feel as if they have a safe and supportive space to learn. I feel safe when I can find comfort in the familiar. I came from Georgia Tech, and before that a high school that was probably 95 percent Black. netbet online sports betting was far less diverse and even more isolating than Georgia Tech,” she said. “But with every challenge, there’s an opportunity, and the feelings of isolation that I felt at netbet online sports betting provided an opportunity to broaden my perspective on education and how I viewed and approached the solutions to problems. To address my feelings of isolation, I sought community in the other disciplines because throughout my time at netbet online sports betting, I was often the only Black graduate student within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. By finding friends in the social sciences, medical sciences and other graduate school programs on campus, and with my colleagues at MIT and engaging in their research discussions, I developed an appreciation for their diverse perspectives. These diverse perspectives shape the way I approach my research even today. netbet online sports betting provided an opportunity for me to expand my interests and develop an inter-disciplinary approach to research.”

For netbet online sports betting, diversity goes beyond race or demographics. Homogeneity of any sort, whether it’s in a community or a company’s technology, can lead to vulnerability. For example, facial recognition software has been shown to be more accurate for White faces than netbet online sports betting ones, likely due to a lack of diversity in the dataset of faces used to train the software.

The only way to combat such vulnerabilities is to have broader representation.

“If you have a homogeneous environment where everyone’s running the same operating system, every machine has the same vulnerability, and everybody can be exploited,” she netbet online sports betting. “We need something that’s going to be robust and resilient, and in order to do that, we need heterogeneity. Even on a biological level, if all our cells were the same, anything that attacks us could just wipe us out. netbet online sports betting need diverse backgrounds and perspectives to design and build robust solutions to today’s problems.”

Whether her undergraduates continue on to graduate education or enter the workforce, netbet online sports betting hopes her students will be able to help bring that robustness to the computer science space.

“I want to prepare them to pursue graduate degrees, or whatever they want to pursue,” Hill said. “You don’t pursue a netbet online sports bettingD. just to have those three letters behind your name and two letters in front. You must have a passion for learning, conducting research and solving problems. When it comes to training students, the first thing I always do is have high expectations for their performance. When others view you as not capable of excellence, that shapes everything. At a baseline, I expect all my students to perform excellently, to give me their personal best.”

Alumni Profile

Alumni profile: Raquel Hill, netbet online sports bettingD. '02

Educating the next generation of netbet online sports betting scientists at Spelman College

Press Contact