2nd edition of the Privacy Research Day: presentation of the researchers

Ero Balsa

Ero Balsa is a postdoctoral research fellow at Cornell Tech. He works on privacy engineering. His work examines the design, analysis and deployment of privacy enhancing technologies and, in particular, the interplay between privacy engineering and policy. His research focuses on the critical analysis of the assumptions that underlie privacy technologies’ design and deployment, the operationalization of privacy requirements, and the systematization of privacy engineering practice. He is interested in technologies that enable users to contest asymmetries of power and knowledge, such as obfuscation tools and protective optimization technologies (POTs). Ero completed his PhD at the University of Leuven, as a member of CO¬SIC’s Privacy Group, with a thesis on the design and analysis of obfuscation technologies.

Marvin van Bekkum

Marvin van Bekkum (LL.M., M.Sc.) is a PhD Candidate at iHub, Radboud University’s interdisciplinary research hub for digitalization and society, in The Netherlands. Marvin researches fairness and non-discrimination of AI systems in the insurance sector. In his research, Marvin tries to combine insights from his education as both a lawyer and a computer scientist.

Sunny Consolvo

Dr. Sunny Consolvo is a researcher at Google where she spends most of her time studying privacy, safety, and security. For more than 8 years, she has been focusing on the experiences and needs of people who are at higher risk of experiencing a digitally-mediated attack or suffering disproportionate harm from such an attack.

Ana-Maria Cretu

Ana-Maria Cretu is a final-year PhD candidate in the Computational Privacy Group at Imperial College London, where she is advised by Dr. Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye. Her research lies at the intersection between machine learning, privacy, and security. She studies privacy and security vulnerabilities in data anonymisation techniques and technologies such as machine learning models, query-based systems, and perceptual hashing-based client-side scanning, through the lens of automated attacks. She obtained an MSc in Computer Science from EPFL, Switzerland, and the Diplome d’Ingénieur de l’Ecole Polytechnique from Ecole Polytechnique, France. She was a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford for 9 months where she worked on deep learning methods for natural language processing. She was a research intern at Microsoft Research, Cambridge (2022) and Twitter, London (2020) and software engineering intern at Google in Boulder (2018) and Paris (2016).

Karel Dhondt

Karel Dhondt is a PhD researcher in the areas of web security and privacy at the imec-DistriNet research group of KU Leuven, under the supervision of Prof. Stijn Volckaert. His interests lie in the security and privacy of online location-based services.

Yana Dimova

Yana Dimova is a PhD at DistriNet KULeuven in Belgium in 2019. Her research interests include a number of topics in privacy, such as online tracking, data leaks on the web and privacy-enhancing technologies. She is also very interested in the intersection between web privacy and law.

Arnaud Grivet Sébert

Arnaud Grivet Sébert is finishing his PhD at CEA List, in Saclay, about "Combining differential privacy and homomorphic encryption for privacy-preserving collaborative machine learning". The goal of his PhD is to design protocols that enable several data owners to collaboratively train a machine learning model while protecting the training data privacy. Two privacy tools are combined: differential privacy and homomorphic encryption.

Before this, he worked as a research engineer in CEA List on explainable AI and fuzzy logic and in LIP6, Sorbonne Université, Paris, on computational social choice.

His research interests are privacy-preserving AI, collaborative and distributed machine learning. He feels also very concerned by ecological issues and how to leverage science to address them.

Florent Guépin

Florent Guépin is a third-year PhD candidate in the Computational Privacy Group, working on the privacy of machine learning-based systems. More specifically, he studies the robustness of these systems against inference attacks such as Property Inference and Attribute Inference. Before starting his PhD, he obtained an MSc in Fundamental Computer Science from ENS Lyon, France, and the Diplôme d’Ingénieur de l’école Centrale de Lyon (equivalent to a Bachelors and Master’s degree) from Centrale Lyon, France.

Shubham Jain

Shubham Jain is a final-year PhD student in the Computational Privacy Group at Imperial College London. His research explores privacy and security vulnerabilities in online safety technologies. Previously, he was a lead developer of a scalable privacy-preserving data analytics platform OPAL (OPen ALgorithms). His work has been published in top security conferences like IEEE SP and USENIX Security, and has also been cited in reports by OfCom (UK) and United Nations. He completed his bachelors from IIT Bombay (India) and was a founding member of a startup, Qure.ai, before joining Imperial College London.

Karel Kubicek

Karel Kubicek is a PhD candidate in the Information Security Group at ETH Zurich. In his research, he automates privacy compliance auditing using machine learning over large datasets of crawled data. Such methods can for instance detect websites' invalid consent for using cookies or sending marketing emails. He also co-authored privacy enhancing browser extension CookieBlock that automatically classifies cookies into purpose categories and filters them according to user preferences.

Lin Kyi

Lin Kyi is a Computer Science PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (Bochum, Germany). Combining her background in psychology, privacy, and human-computer interaction, her work broadly focuses on the human factors of data protection and compliance, where she takes a user-centric approach to understand how we can improve data protection for users, and compliance amongst practitioners.

Marylin Laurent

Maryline Laurent, PhD works as a Full Professor at Télécom SudParis, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France. She leads the RST department (Telecommunication Networks and services) of Télécom SudParis. She is co-founder of the chair of Institut Mines-Télécom “Values and Policies of Personal Information”. Her research topics are related to security and privacy, particularly on privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), for digital identity management services, Internet of Things and cloud environments.

René Mahieu

Dr. René Mahieu is assistant professor of data protection and privacy law at Open University Netherlands, and senior advisor at the Dutch data protection authority. He has written his dissertation and published widely on the right of access to personal data. His current research focuses primarily on questions around effective enforcement of data protection law by national supervisory authorities.

Laurianne Trably

Laurianne Trably is in her 4th year of Ph.D. program in sociology at CERLIS (Centre de Recherche sur les Liens Sociaux), Université Paris Cité and at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Her research interests are in digital practices, online self exposure and digital inequalities between rural and urban areas. Her current work examines how rural adults are using social networks and what do they choose to expose from their life to other internet users.

Evgeniia Volkova

Evgeniia Volkova is a third-year PhD Law student at the University Toulouse 1 Capitole. Her research focuses on data governance for artificial intelligence (AI) systems in urban mobility. She holds a Master's degree in international law from the Saint Petersburg State University, a Master's degree in international economic law from the Kyushu University and a Master's degree in intellectual property (IP) and new technologies law from the University of Grenoble Alpes. As a PhD student, she presented her papers at the international conferences in France, Spain and Egypt. She has professional experience in data protection and IP Law.