Rahul Telang

Rahul Telang is professor of Information systems and Management at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University and at the Tepper School of Business (Courtesy). He has been at the Heinz College since 2002 and predominantly teaches in the School of Information Systems and Management.

Professor Telang’s is broadly interested in how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and associated digitization of information impact consumers, business and policies. Within this thread, his interest lies in two major domains. First is Digital Media Industry with a particular focus on how digitization (and associated piracy) in copyrighted industries is affecting the incentives of content provider, distributors and users. His research is directed towards understanding and shaping an optimal copyright and intellectual property policy in the Digitization Era. He was the recipient of Sloan Foundation Industry Study fellowship and a number of Google Faculty awards. He is also co-director of a center IDEA (Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics). He has worked extensively with industry and policy makers on variety of issue surrounding digitization of Media.

His second area of work is on economics of information security and privacy. His key interest is in understanding the incentives of various parties (users, firms and hackers), why markets fail, how to create a useful policy framework and how to measure the effectiveness of such policies. His work explored the controversy surrounding vulnerability disclosure, vulnerability markets and their role in generating optimal outcomes. Recently, he has been examining the role of data breach disclosure laws on identity thefts. He was the recipient of NSF CAREER award for his work on economics of information security. He is also part of Cylab and Institute for Infrastructure Protection (I3P). Currently, he is working on a large NSA funded project on examining home users’ security and privacy behavior.

Some of his other work has explored the role of broadband in schools, ICTs in for form of EMR (Electronic Medical Records) in hospitals, issue of number portability, exclusivity and so on in mobile industry.