Julien Gamba is a data scientist at Cisco Systems. Prior to this he worked in the Internet Analytics Group at the IMDEA Networks Institute where he received his PhD in computer science from Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain. His research during his PhD revolved around user’s privacy in mobile devices and networks. In his work, Julien used both static and dynamic analysis, as well as custom techniques specifically designed to understand the behavior of mobile applications. Recently, Julien was the first author of the first large-scale analysis of the privacy and security risks of pre-installed software on Android devices and their supply chain, which was awarded the Best Practical Paper Award at the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2020, as well as prizes from the French and Spanish data protection agencies. This study was featured in many newspapers with large circulation such as The Guardian (UK), the New York Times (USA), CDNet (USA) or El País (Spain). Julien was also awarded the ACM IMC Community Contribution Award in 2018 for his analysis of domain ranking services.
Fellowship Project: Android Observatory
In 2020, CR awarded Julien Gamba an Innovation Lab Fellowship to help build an “Android Observatory” to better understand what app carriers and retailers may pre-install your devices. The tool studies the prevalence of user tracking services and other unwanted and harmful apps in the Android ecosystem.