Project duration: Jan 2020 - Dec 2023
PRIMA
pRIVACY MATTERS
PriMa (Privacy Matters) is an Innovative Training Network (ITN) funded by the EU through the Horizon 2020 Framework. PriMa is a collaboration between 7 research locations and 7 industrial partner organisations with a focus on the analysis and mitigation of privacy risks in a rapidly digitalising society. One factor contributing to the erosion of privacy is the growth in recognition technologies that not only facilitate the recognition of individuals but also the inference from biometric data of emotional state, gender, health, age, and even profession. Another factor is the fast advancement of artificial intelligence, allowing for extensive data mining, and aggregation, linkage and inference of personal information. Hence, there is a real possibility that acceptable privacy may become unattainable unless technological and societal steps are taken to allow citizens to regain control of their personal information. Therefore, the overall objectives of PriMa are:
1. To train 14 creative, entrepreneurial, and innovative researchers as privacy protection experts.
2. To contribute to a full understanding of the multidisciplinary nature of privacy protection in a digitalised society.
3. To contribute to the development of solutions that address this important societal challenge.
PriMa will train a next generation of researchers to define, investigate and implement solutions that ensure secure and efficient privacy protection whilst keeping the advantages of a digitalised society, and provide them with transferable skills to enable effective planning, management and communication of research ideas and outcomes. This will give them excellent career opportunities.
PriMa is coordinated by the DMB group of the Univertsity of Twente (https://www.utwente.nl/en/eemcs/dmb/). The coordinator is Raymond Veldhuis (r.n.j.veldhuis@utwente.nl). PriMa has 14 open positions for PhD students, which are listed below. Applications for specific positions can be made via the links in the descriptions. You can apply for more than one position.
ESR1, Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), Spain:
The chair for Biometrics at UAM (http://atvs.ii.uam.es/fierrez/) seeks an early-stage researcher pursuing a PhD qualification in the area of biometrics and deep learning. The specific research topic of this position is to develop theory and methodologies to quantify privacy in the context of data (traditional biometrics as well as touch and movement patterns, soft biometrics, and context information) acquired through the interaction of the user with mobile devices. The candidate is expected to carry out a systematic study of the state of the art. Multimodal datasets containing mobile user interaction data will be collected. New methods and metrics to better quantify privacy will be proposed and applied to the biometric data under consideration in continuous authentication schemes. Information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu. Contact: ruben.vera@uam.es (CC julian.fierrez@uam.es)
ESR2, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK:
The University of Kent seeks to appoint an Early-Stage Researcher in the area of biometrics and deep learning. The specific project will study the data-richness of background sensor data elements obtained from mobile devices in a continuous biometric authentication scenario. We shall explore how ‘personalised’ data elements are, thereby providing an analysis as to which elements can enable accurate authentication, and by extension require the most privacy protection. In particular, we shall examine the sensitivity of combinations of data elements, the ability to infer one data element from another and how individuals and groups may be able to resist such challenges to their privacy. Information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR3, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands:
The chair for Biometric Pattern Recognition seeks an early-stage researcher pursuing a PhD qualification in the area of biometrics and deep learning. The specific research topic of this position is to analyse and mitigate the risk of biometric profiling based on features extracted in deep-learning-based face recognition. The researcher will investigate: (1) The risk of biometric profiling by attributes that can be inferred from features, such as profession, age, gender, health condition. (2) The characteristics of the facial image that contribute to profiling. (3) Methods to reduce the risk of profiling that can be integrated in the face recognition system. Information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR4, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Gjøvik, Norway:
NTNU Gjøvik seeks an early-stage researcher pursuing a PhD qualification on the topic of Modelling Private Identity Management Behaviours by Digital Footprints. How a person manages his/her private identities can be heavily influenced by the person’s knowledge scope, personality, body characteristics, and life patterns, which can be traced as digital footprints online. The specific task for this researcher position is to investigate and test this assumption, by quantifying the relations between digital footprints and identity attributes and modelling these by statistical and machine intelligence methods. Particular attention will be paid to the dynamics of human behaviours in identity management under various scenarios. Social communication mechanisms in real life such as social network and social robot are to be utilised to test the models by experiments compliant to the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR 5, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium:
The Centre for Information Technology and Intellectual Property Rights (CiTiP) (see https://www.law.kuleuven.be/citip/en) seeks a legal researcher in privacy and biometrics in health and activity tracking and seeking a PhD qualification. The Marie Curie fellow researcher will investigate the fitness of data protection concepts for the risks posed, e.g. of sensor-rich health and activity trackers, and review both technical and legal privacy preserving measures. The research should also aim to make new suggestions for the legal protection of these personal data, mostly collected by multiple parties and stored in cloud solutions, and for such further use, such as in clinical trial environments. More information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR6, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK:
The University of Kent seeks to appoint an Early-Stage Researcher in the area of biometric systems engineering. This specific project will investigate emerging and future approaches to sensor-level identity hiding. Examples of identity hiding include wearing a hat or using makeup to render facial detection and recognition problematic. Alternatively, direct interference with the sensor involves techniques such as projecting noise signals to directly interfere with the biometric sub-system. The project will seek to evaluate what is i) possible now, and also in the future, and ii) how the performance of such approaches can be evaluated. These will be topics for research in this project across a range of modalities including face/iris, gate and voice. Information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR 7, Norwegian Computing Center (NR), Oslo, Norway:
The Norwegian Computing Center (NR) seeks a research fellow (Early-Stage Researcher pursuing a PhD) to work on the topic of identity provisioning in the cloud. The objective of the work is to study how privacy, security and user experience are affected by design choices when building services that use cloud-based identities. Such choices include what user data to collect, and how and where to process the data and store it. Topics include secure authentication, security of cloud-based services, formal modelling, advanced data analysis and its effect on privacy, and the relation between privacy, user experience and security. The ESR fellow will study the principles of identity provisioning, enabling sound methods for identity provisioning and authenticating to cloud-based services.
The ESR will be employed by and work at NR in Oslo, but he or she will follow the PhD program at NTNU Gjøvik. More information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR8, Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), Spain:
The chair for Biometrics at UAM (http://atvs.ii.uam.es/fierrez/) seeks an early-stage researcher pursuing a PhD qualification in the area of biometrics and privacy protection. The specific research topic of this position is on privacy protection for multimodal biometric systems. The main scientific goals will be: 1) to analyze the main challenges and requirements of biometric template protection, both for security and privacy, in single and multi-modal biometric systems; 2) to evaluate several state of the art approaches, the information stored, the recognition performance, the potential advantages and limitations; 3) to review existing and propose novel metrics to measure the levels of noninvertibility, revocability and unlinkability of biometric templates for multimodal systems. Information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu. Contact: ruben.vera@uam.es (CC julian.fierrez@uam.es)
ESR9, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands:
The chair for Biometric Pattern Recognition seeks an early-stage researcher pursuing a PhD qualification in the area of biometrics and homomorphic encryption. Recent research has shown that a novel approach integrating the optimal likelihood-ratio-based classifier in a homomorphic encryption scheme results in a very fast biometric recognition under encryption with near optimal recognition performance. The specific research topic of this position is to develop this approach further. The researcher will investigate the integration of this approach in deep-learning-based biometric recognition and the extension to other multi-party schemes and more malicious attack scenarios. Information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR10, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Gjøvik, Norway:
NTNU Gjøvik seeks an early-stage researcher pursuing a PhD qualification on the topic of Multi-party social contracts and privacy mechanisms. The trend of personalised digital services inspires us to look for new models for definitions and legislations regarding privacy. The social contract approach is a promising concept to model privacy in a future of personalised digital services from the perspective of cross-party rights and duties provenance and computational negotiation instead of trying to define information ownership. There are uncertainties in the legal, ethical, and technological aspects of implementing this concept in practice. This researcher position will investigate and evaluate the regulatory, technical, and ethical feasibility using social contract and contract-based identity management to protect privacy in the future, and the researcher will be trained to become an expert in the social contract approach to model privacy. Information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR 11, Norwegian Computing Center (NR), Oslo, Norway:
The Norwegian Computing Center (NR) seeks a research fellow (Early-Stage Researcher pursuing a PhD) to work on the topic of detecting privacy problems in software. The objective of this work to give an operational definition of the term “privacy defect” and thus enable the semi-automatic detection of privacy-related issues in software. The work will build on previous work on formal specification and on existing tools for property checking and analysis of software. The project shall adapt and extend techniques to discover defects and design flaws related to processing of personal data and privacy policies, including the treatment of biometric information in distributed systems. The work will facilitate the building of tools that help software development organisations write software that complies with data protection regulation (such as the GDRP). The ESR will be employed by and work at NR in Oslo, but he or she will follow the PhD programme at NTNU Gjøvik. More information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR12, University of Würzburg, Germany:
The chair for Biological Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy (BioKlin) seeks a research assistant (early-stage researcher pursuing a PhD qualification) in the area of social Virtual Reality. The specific research topic of this position are privacy matters emerging from cognitive and social factors as well as the user’s emotional state with the goal to develop and use innovative ecologically valid approaches to evaluate and improve consumer acceptance, usage and usability of privacy protection solutions. Information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR13, University of Würzburg, Germany:
The chair for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) seeks a research assistant (early-stage researcher pursuing a PhD qualification) in the area of social Virtual Reality. The specific research topic of this position are privacy matters emerging from the interaction between humanoid avatars, e.g., research and development of methods to evaluate, secure, and improve overall usability and user experience (UX) with a specific focus on trust, trustworthiness, and authenticity between live-like photorealistic avatars. Information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
ESR 14, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium:
The Centre for Information Technology and Intellectual Property Rights (CiTiP) (see https://www.law.kuleuven.be/citip/en) seeks a legal researcher for reconciling blockchain, biometrics and privacy for digital identities and seeking a PhD qualification. The Marie Curie fellow researcher will investigate the legal conditions, including the GDPR fitness, for blockchain identities in combination with dynamic behavioural biometrics and location data, collected by smart devices, including body monitors and smart watches. The research should also look into the individuals’ rights and suggest an appropriate legal framework for the reconciliation of the risks and the advantages of biometrics in combination with blockchain for digital identities. More information about the application procedure can be found at www.prima-itn.eu.
Regarding the privacy of your date we would like to inform you that your application and personal information sent to the EurAxess jobportal, the PRIMA website and/or the individual recruiting entities will be processed (i) by the European Commission, within the modalities specified under its Privacy Statement ; and (ii) by all or some PRIMA Consortium members. For the latter, your application data and personal information you provide during the recruiting process, will be shared with and processed by the University of Twente (the PRIMA coordinator), Building Zilverling 4087, PO Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, the Netherlands, as well as all or some PRIMA main consortium members (as listed and with contact details on this website above). The PRIMA Coordinator and the PRIMA Consortium members will process your personal data and act as joint controllers, for purposes of (i) considering your application and possible selection, (ii) recruitment and hiring for the present and possible other or future research projects. The processing basis is the necessity for (pre-) contract preparations and the legitimate interest of the PRIMA consortium members to review, compare and select candidates for PRIMA and possibly other research projects, if any. Your personal data will be kept for until 1 year after the end of the PRIMA project.
You have data access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and portability rights subject to the applicable data protection legislations. For questions, exercise of your rights and more data protection information, you can contact b.j.connell@utwente.nl as well as the respective PRIMA members' data protection officers.