The Inaugural Lecture of Professor Emiliano De Cristofaro

About Emiliano De Cristofaro's Inaugural Lecture

In this talk, Emiliano shares his personal journey, over the past decade, doing large-scale data-driven research in industry and academia on some of these challenges.

Emiliano provides examples of how we can use a wide range of "PETs" -- i.e., Privacy-Enhancing Technologies -- to support a number of computational scenarios (e.g., in the context of information sharing, analytics, or even genomics) in such a way that privacy of users and security of entities can be formally guaranteed. 

Emiliano also covers his work on information weaponisation: using concrete examples from his research. He delves into some of the unique datasets that was collected and analysis that was performed, focusing on emerging issues like hate speech/harassment campaigns and modeling the influence that "fringe" Web communities have on the spread of fake news, weaponised memes, etc.

Emiliano De Cristofaro's Inaugural Lecture

 

About Emiliano

Emiliano De Cristofaro was a Professor of Security and Privacy-Enhancing Technologies at University College London (UCL), where he headed the Information Security Research Group. He is also Faculty Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, technology advisor to the Information Commissioner's Office, and co-founder of iDrama Labs.

Before moving to London in 2013, he was a research scientist at Xerox PARC. In 2011, he received his PhD in Networked Systems from the University of California, Irvine. Overall, Emiliano does research in the broad security, safety, and privacy areas. 

His current work consist on tackling problems at the intersection of machine learning and security/privacy, as well as understanding and countering information weaponization via data-driven analysis.

In 2013 and 2014, he co-chaired the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, and, in 2018, the security and privacy tracks at WWW and ACM CCS.