Maaz Bin Musa, a graduate student from the Department of Computer Science, attended the EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing) conference in Miami this November to present his collaborative research on a novel dataset aimed at automating privacy compliance. His paper, titled "CP3A: An Open Dataset of Expert-Annotated and Regulation-Aware Privacy Policies to Enable Scalable Regulatory Compliance Audits," focuses on helping organizations identify privacy-related disclosures in line with data privacy regulations, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Musa created the CP3A dataset to improve the efficiency and accuracy of compliance audits by ensuring it contains relevant CCPA information. "It's a basic ML approach," said Musa. "If the dataset isn’t relevant to CCPA, it won't be useful for training a model that automates the extraction of CCPA-related information."

The paper, co-authored with researchers from the Department of Computer Science and the Law School, introduces a unique dataset designed to automate the extraction of privacy disclosures. By focusing on data privacy regulations, the research aims to make compliance more scalable and efficient for organizations, especially those in heavily regulated industries.

The research was made possible through a collaboration with Law faculty Professor Mihailis Diamantis from and Professor Rishab Nithyanand, Assistant Professor and Emeriti-Faculty Scholar in the Department of Computer Science, who established a research lab focused on Law and Privacy projects. This lab provided Musa with invaluable resources and guidance, helping him refine his research in privacy compliance and machine learning.

This was Musa's first time attending the EMNLP conference, as well as his first visit to Miami. Traditionally, he has focused on submitting his work to privacy-specific conferences, so attending a machine learning conference with over 3,500 attendees was both exciting and overwhelming. "The talks were very diverse and interesting," he said. "But unfortunately, I couldn’t attend them all since they happened simultaneously."

Despite the busy schedule, Musa's favorite part of the trip was experiencing the food culture in Miami. Together with his research group, he explored a wide variety of restaurants, including Vietnamese, Turkish, Italian, and Cuban establishments, making the experience both professionally and personally rewarding.

Reflecting on his experience, Musa shared some advice for younger grad students:

If you're a younger grad student, network, meet random people, shortlist papers that interest you and just talk to those people. Go to job stalls and talk with them in detail and find common ground. Conferences are amazing for young students to meet and learn about the latest work.