Early in October, Senior Vice Provost David Luzzi installed motion sensors under all the desks at the school's Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex (ISEC), a facility used by graduate students and home to the "Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute" which studies surveillance.The ISEC is a nice building, the computer science department brings in a lot of money, they get to use it a lot, and so it may make sense for the university to try and study how desks are used so they can expand or optimize access to it.“In order to develop best practices for assigning desks and seating within ISEC, the Office of the Provost will be conducting a study aimed at quantifying the usage of currently assigned seating in the write-up areas outside of the labs and the computational research desks,” Luzzi wrote in the email.“The results will be used to develop best practices for assigning desks and seating within ISEC (and EXP in due course).” To that end, Luzzi wrote, the university had deployed “a Spaceti occupancy monitoring system” that would use heat sensors at groin level to “aggregate data by subzones to generate when a desk is occupied or not.” Luzzi added that the data would be anonymized, aggregated to look at “themes” and not individual time at assigned desks, not be used in evaluations, and not shared with any supervisors of the students.After hacking the devices, students wrote an open letter to Luzzi and university president Joseph E. Aoun asking for the sensors to be removed because they were intimidating, part of a poorly conceived study, and deployed without IRB approval even though human subjects were at the center of the so-called study."