Shortcuts

Funding Opportunities for PhD Applicants

Shujun looks for self-motivated PhD students all the time. Shujun maintains a page for funding opportunities for PhD students here. The page may be out-dated so please also contact him for more advice.

Selected Topics for Full-Time PhD Students Studying at University of Kent

• Studies on online child protection, parental control, pre-university cyber security and online safety education, and creative approaches to cyber security and online safety education / learning / engagement / awareness raising especially for children and families (see here for a recent report Shujun co-authored for potential research problems)
• Digital data deception (DDD), mis- and disinformation, deepfakes, AI-generated content (e.g., by ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion/Midjourney), and other topics about quality of online information (all aspects are welcome, including but not limited to understanding, detection and prevention) (see here for a series of technology watch newsletter on DDD, co-edited by Shujun between 2020-2022)
• Interactions between AI techniques and security, privacy, and ethics particularly large language models (LLMs), explainable AI (XAI) and federated learning (FL) (see here for an example paper on FL and XAI for healthcare)
• User-centric security and privacy in typical cyber-physical (eco)systems, such as smart transport, smart homes, and e-health (see Shujun's project PriVELT for one example project in smart transport)
• Cyber laws especially data protection, privacy and online safety laws such as the EU/UK GDPR and how they interact with online users and new technologies such as privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), AI, distributed ledgers, blockchains and cryptocurrencies (see here for an example paper on the tension between the GDPR and public blockchain systems)
• Any "measuring the Internet, the Web, the metaverse and the blockchains" type of research related to security, privacy, trust and wider issues such as cybercrime, privacy leakage, false information, online safety, use of different user authentication methods especially passwords (see here for some example papers of Shujun)
• User authentication, especially password cracking, new password-based authentication systems against observer attacks (see here, here and here for three example papers)
• Security visualization especially visualization of passwords (see here for an example paper)
• Application of eye-tracking and extended reality (XR, including VR and AR) in cyber security, user privacy and multimedia computing (Shujun's team has a number of eye-trackers and VR kits available for such research) (see here for an example paper)
• Socio-technical aspects of distributed ledgers, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, especially analysis of cybercrime and cyber attacks related to such technologies
• Hybrid human-machine computing such as new applications of human computation (e.g. crowdsourcing and games with a purpose) and social computing
• Human behavior related side channel attacks (see Shujun's COMMANDO-HUMANS project and work at SOUPS 2011)
• New forms of steganography and steganalysis (e.g., hiding information in online social networks, see Shujun's MPS 2018 paper)
• Any other topics that can extend any work in Shujun's more recent research publications (excluding chaos-based cryptography and cryptanalysis, image and video encryption, and multimedia coding, which are topics Shujun has stopped working on)

Short-Term Projects for UG/Master's Students and Visiting PhD students

Shujun also welcomes short-term visiting research students and interns, who can work on smaller and more well-defined narrow topics and tasks. Any topics that are aligned with the above listed PhD topics can be considered, so please contact him to discuss.