Biography

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I am currently a post-doc at NYU, you can find my new home page here . Previously, I was a post-doc at COSIC/ESAT working on privacy in social networks, requirements engineering, privacy enhancing technologies and identity management systems. I am also part of the Privacy and Identity Management Group.

I completed my PhD titled "Multilateral Privacy Requirements Analysis in Online Social Networks" at the Arenberg School in the group HMDB of the Computer Science Department also at the Catholic University in Leuven . Bettina Berendt and Bart Preneel were my supervisors.

I am the coordinator of the interdisciplinary project "Security and Privacy in Social Networks" (SPION) supported by the Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT) in Belgium. I participate as a researcher in two EU projects "Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services" (TAS³) and "Global Identity Networking of Individuals" (GINI) where I do research on privacy and security requirements engineering.

Projects and studies:

• Research assistant, COSIC
  Department of Electrical Engineering, K.U. Leuven, Belgium (march 2009 - current)

• Research assistant, Hypermedia and Databases Research Group
  Department of Computer Science, K.U. Leuven, Belgium (february 2008 - february 2009)

• Research assistant, Department of Information Systems, Project InterVal
  Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany (January, 2005 - December 2007)

• Research assistant, DiMeB (Digital media in education),
  University of Bremen, Bremen, Bermany (May, 2004 - January 2005)

• M.A. Equivalent Degree in Computing (Diplom Informatik),
  Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany (Graduation: April, 2004)

• B.S. Mathematics, B.A. International Relations and Peace,
  University of Redlands, Redlands, CA, U.S.A. (Graduation: 1996)

Participation in program committees:

• Identity in the Information Society Workshop, (2009, 2010)
• International Conference on Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (2011)

Peer reviewer for following publications:

• Pervasive and Mobile Computing (2011)
• Journal of Science and Engineering Ethics (2011)
• European Journal of Information Systems (2011)
• International Conference on Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (2009, 2010,2011)
• Identity in the Information Society Journal (2009, 2010)

Research Interests

My research is on developing ways to consolidate the privacy requirements of different stakeholders and the various notions of privacy or privacy solutions proposed by engineers when building systems. Specifically, I am interested in addressing matters around privacy in the application domain of social networks. In order to do that, I use theories from surveillance studies to understand how surveillance is affecting our notions of privacy and which concepts are useful in different contexts when building information systems. In TAS³and GINI I also do work on identity management systems and the implemenation of data protection principles in the design and architecture of information systems. In the past, I have done work on security requirements, open source philosophies and applications, and elearning.