Privacy Summer School 2025

Speakers

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  Daniel Slamanig – Website

  Daniel Slamanig is Full Professor of Cryptology at the Universität der Bundeswehr München (UniBw M), Department of Computer Science, and the Research Institute Cyber Defense (CODE), where he leads the Quantum Safe & Advanced Cryptography (QuSAC) Lab. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Klagenfurt in 2011. Before joining UniBw M in 2023, he was a Senior Scientist in the cryptography research group at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology (2017–2023), a lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology (2018–2020), and a PostDoc and later Senior Researcher at the Institute of Information Security (formerly IAIK) at Graz University of Technology (2012–2017). His research interests span the foundations and applications of cryptography, with a particular focus on provably secure public-key cryptographic primitives and privacy-preserving cryptographic mechanisms. He is a member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

  Universität der Bundeswehr München

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  Ming Ding – Website

  Ming Ding (IEEE M'12-SM'17) received the B.S. (with first-class Hons.) and M.S. degrees in electronics engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), China, and the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree in signal and information processing from SJTU, in 2004, 2007, and 2011, respectively. From April 2007 to September 2014, he worked at Sharp Laboratories of China as a Researcher/Senior Researcher/Principal Researcher. Currently, he is the Group Leader of the Privacy Technology Group at CSIRO's Data61 in Sydney, NSW, Australia. Also, he is an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University of Technology and University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His research interests include data privacy and security, machine learning and AI, and information technology. He has co-authored more than 300 papers in IEEE/ACM journals and conferences, all in recognized venues, and around 20 3GPP standardization contributions, as well as two books, i.e., “Multi-point Cooperative Communication Systems: Theory and Applications” (Springer, 2013) and “Fundamentals of Ultra-Dense Wireless Networks” (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Also, he holds 21 US patents and has co-invented another 100+ patents on 4G/5G technologies. Currently, he is an editor of IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials and IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering. Besides, he has served as a guest editor/co-chair/co-tutor/TPC member for multiple IEEE top-tier journals/conferences and received several awards for his research work and professional services, including the prestigious IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2022 and Highly Cited Researcher recognized by Clarivate Analytics in 2024.

  CSIRO's Data61

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  Natasha Fernandes – Website

  Natasha is a lecturer in Cybersecurity with special interests in privacy-preserving technologies and mathematical techniques for analysing information leaks in secure systems. She holds an undergraduate degree in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Sydney, and a PhD in Computing from Macquarie University and École Polytechnique in France. Natasha has also worked extensively in industry as a software engineer specialising in backend web applications. Natasha's research interests are in the mathematical foundations of data privacy, particularly involving differential privacy, natural language processing or machine learning. Her work involves probabilistic reasoning using quantitative information flow techniques which derive from information-theoretic principles. Natasha's research aims at developing mathematical principles to support the analysis of privacy-preserving systems, as well as the development of software tools to support the application of these mathematical techniques in practical engineering scenarios.

  Macquarie University

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  Nishanth Chandran – Website

  Nishanth Chandran is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India. His research interests are in problems related to cryptography, secure computation, and AI security. Prior to joining MSRI, Nishanth was a Researcher at AT&T Labs, and before that he was a Post-doctoral Researcher at MSR Redmond. Nishanth is a recipient of the 2010 Chorafas Award for exceptional achievements in research and his research has received coverage in science journals and in the media at venues such as Nature and MIT Technology Review. He has published several papers in top computer science conferences and journals such as Crypto, Eurocrypt, IEEE S&P, CCS, STOC, FOCS, SIAM Journal of Computing, Journal of the ACM, and so on. His work on position-based cryptography was selected as one of the top 3 works and invited to QIP 2011 as a plenary talk. Nishanth has served on the technical program committee of many of the top cryptography conferences on several occasions and he holds several US Patents. Nishanth received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA, M.S. in Computer Science from UCLA, and B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from Anna University. Nishanth is also a top ranking (A grade) All India Radio South Indian Classical (Carnatic) Violinist and has performed at international venues such as the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles (as part of legendary sitarist Late Pandit Ravi Shankar’s ensemble) and the Madras Music Academy, Chennai.

  Microsoft Research

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  Sanchari Das – Website

  Dr. Sanchari Das is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology at George Mason University (GMU), where she directs the Data Agency & Security (DAS) Lab and the Secure Realities Lab. The labs focus on human-centered, adaptive privacy and security in AI systems for critical socio-technical environments.

  Her group's publications and collaborations appear in top venues across privacy, security, and trustworthy AI, and she has mentored 30+ students who have gone on to impactful careers. Her work has been presented at CHI, ASSETS, USENIX, NDSS, IEEE S&P, RSA, Black Hat, and Financial Cryptography, earning best-paper recognitions at CSCW, ICISSP, and IoTDI. She has secured funding support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Google, Meta (Facebook), Cisco, and others including $1.9M+ in research funding.

  Before joining GMU, Dr. Das was an Assistant Professor at the University of Denver, where she received the Distinguished Faculty Award and the Provost's Award for Excellence in Academic Advising. She holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington and brings industry experience from American Express, Parity Technologies, and HCL.

  George Mason University (IST)

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  Suranga Seneviratne – Website

  Dr. Suranga Seneviratne is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Networked Systems and Security (NSS) Lab in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of New South Wales in 2015 and his Bachelor’s degree in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Moratuwa in 2005.

  His research interests span computer networks, network security, and the application of artificial intelligence in security. He has authored and co-authored over 75 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers, including publications in top-tier venues such as WWW, TMLR, CVPR, MobiSys, and TMC.

  Dr. Seneviratne has an extensive track record of leading industry- and government-funded research projects, supported by organisations such as the Australian Research Council (ARC), Google, the Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG), the Department of Defence (DoD), the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), and Axiata Digital Labs. Since joining the University of Sydney in 2017, he has secured over $5 million in external research funding, including approximately $2.2 million in the past two years.

  The University of Sydney

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  Thorsten Strufe – Website

  Thorsten Strufe is Professor of IT Security at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), adjunct professor at TU Dresden, and an internationally recognized expert in privacy, security, and large-scale distributed systems. He serves as Deputy Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence CeTI (Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop) and is a principal investigator in major research initiatives including the German Competence Center for IT Security KASTEL. His research focuses on enhancing privacy and resilience in social networks and distributed systems, with a special interest in privacy-preserving, decentralized technologies that challenge the dominant data-collection models of today's digital platforms.

  With over a decade of leadership in collaborative research, he has contributed to numerous national and international projects funded by the EU, German Research Foundation, and other agencies. His work spans interdisciplinary collaborations at the intersection of technology, ethics, and society, with projects addressing topics from secure communication and anonymous networking to user behavior and data protection in online environments.

  He has authored and co-authored numerous publications in leading journals and conferences, and his research has been recognized with several best paper awards. Before joining KIT, he held academic positions at TU Dresden, TU Darmstadt, University of Mannheim, and EURECOM, shaping research and teaching in privacy and network security across Europe. He actively engages in global academic communities, fostering international partnerships and dialogue on building secure and trustworthy digital infrastructures.

  Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

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  Qiang Tang – Website

  Qiang Tang is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. From 2016-2020, he was an Assistant Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Director of the JACOBI Blockchain Lab. Before that, he was a postdoc at Cornell. His research spans broadly on applied cryptography and blockchain with works mostly appears in flagship security/crypto/distributed computing venues, including CRYPTO/EUROCRYPT/ASIACRYPT, CCS/SP/USENIX Sec/NDSS and PODC etc. He won a few awards including the SOAR Prize, MIT TR35, best paper awards (e.g., DSN25, ICDCS24, ASIACRYPT16) and research awards from Google, Oracle and multiple top blockchain foundations. He served as Program Co-Chair of PKC 2024.

  The University of Sydney

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  Vanessa Teague – Website

  Vanessa Teague's research focuses on election security and verification. In 2023 she received the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice (with Stark, Blom and Lindeman) for her work on Risk Limiting Audits for preferential elections, which will now run in election audits in the State of Colorado. She has also made significant contributions to the security of elections in Switzerland and Australia, having identified a series of serious problems in the cryptography of the Swiss and iVote Internet voting systems, which (at least in the Swiss case) were corrected as a result of the discovery. Her team at the university of Melbourne demonstrated re-identification of public Medicare-PBS data, which led to significant changes in Australian government data sharing.

  Her research work focuses on cryptographic analysis that has important implications for matters of public interest, particularly elections but also data privacy and other related topics. Her current main focus is Democracy Developers, which she founded in 2022 to translate these ideas into open-source software supporting Australian democracy.

  Thinking Cybersecurity / The Australian National University