Lalana is a Research Scientist at MITCSAIL and the Deputy Director of the
Decentralized Information Group (DIG).
She is also a Web Science Research Institute Research Fellow.
Her current research focus is on policy-based frameworks and protocols for
security and privacy on the (Semantic) Web and on improving transparency and accountability of
knowledge inference across heterogeneous information systems.
She is a former postdoctoral associate at MIT and was supervised by
Tim Berners-Lee.
She received PhD (advisor Tim Finin) and
M.S. degrees from
the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where
she worked with the Ebiquity group
on various aspects of trust, security, and general policy management in dynamic
distributed environments including the Semantic Web, multi-agent
systems, and pervasive computing systems.