Amin Amin Tootoonchian
PhD Student
Systems and Networking Group
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto

Contact Information:
Bahen Centre for Information Technology
40 St. George St., Room BA 5165
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2E4 Canada

E-mail: amin at cs toronto edu
About

I joined the Systems and Networking Group of Department of Computer Science at University of Toronto in September 2007. I got my bachelor's degree from Department of Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology in July 2007.

My supervisors are Prof. Yashar Ganjali and Prof. Stefan Saroiu.

Projects

Currently, I am working on Lockr. Lockr decouples content sharing and delivery from social networks and let's people manage their social relations in a single place and share their personal content across the web and grant access to their friends based on the type of social relationship between them.

We have implemented Lockr Center -- a Facebook application -- for exchanging passes between friends. Passes are digital documents signed by their issuer that can be used to prove existence of a social relationship in its validity time frame. Passes can be used to get access to the personal content of the friends regardless of the system in which the user has shared the content on. We also implemented Lockr for Firefox -- a Mozilla Firefox extension -- that emulates social access control for web sites (currently Flickr is the only supported web site).

Upon first use of Lockr for Firefox, it directs the user to initiliaze his profile on Lockr Center. The user can then go to Flickr and upload socially restricted content. Lockr guarantees that the real socially protected photos are only shown to those who hold appropriate pass from (have appropriate social relation with) the owner of the image. Non-authorized users will see a fake placeholder instead.