On behalf of the school, we would like to invite our Graduating Students and your guests to our upcoming graduation reception.
Please join us in celebrating your achievements and marking this significant milestone in your academic journey with a glass of bubbly and some cakes from Fisher and Donaldsons
We look forward to seeing you there.
Best Wishes,
The Admin Team
On June 25th, recent PhD graduate, Dr. Gregor Haywood, took to the stage to receive the 2025 “Best PhD Dissertation” award from the Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance (SICSA).
Gregor (Lecturer in the Department of Cybersecurity and Computing at Abertay University, and PhD Award Recipient) standing next to Debbie Meharg, Head of Applied Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University, Director of Education for SICSA, and the Awards Chair for the SICSA PhD Conference 2025
Haywood’s thesis on “Enhancing Privacy for Secure Internet Communications Using ILNP” focuses on how underlying communication protocols for the Internet could avoid privacy leaks, while continuing to utilise existing and unmodified hardware, infrastructure, and Internet services. His study was driven by his academic interest in the unintended design consequences within large interconnected systems:
I was captivated by working on a project that was socially relevant, deeply technical, and – ultimately – solvable. During my undergraduate degree, I started looking at private communication mechanisms as a side project which turned into my fourth year dissertation, and continued onwards within my PhD. I like finding these unanticipated problems, such as privacy leaks, security vulnerabilities, and environmental impacts, then designing new solutions that fix the problems without disrupting the operation of the larger systems at play.
(Dr Gregor Haywood)
Professor Saleem Bhatti (School of Computer Science, Thesis Supervisor) adds how Haywood’s work demonstrates what he believes to be ‘the first deployable mechanisms for perturbing traffic flow correlation attacks at the network level, as well as perturbing privacy attacks by traffic analysis as might be performed by a machine-learning system.’ For this reason, he was enthusiastic to nominate Haywood’s thesis for SICSA stating it is ‘an excellent balance between science and engineering’ that explores ‘a radical new architecture in addressing using the Identifier Locator Network Protocol (ILNP) to provide new privacy features, and an open-source implementation in FreeBSD that is usable across the existing Internet.’
The SICSA PhD Conference is a flagship event that brings together various participants from fourteen Scottish Universities to network, seek graduate researcher training, and share current interdisciplinary projects. Dr. Tristan Henderson (Senior Lecturer and Computer Science Director of Postgraduate Research) comments that submitting to awards like SICSA encompasses the primary aim of a PhD which is ‘learning how to become a researcher.’ For this reason, SICSA is a valuable opportunity that allows for ‘visibility’ and ‘recognition’ of one’s work both nationally and internationally adds Professor Bhatti.
In recalling his own researcher journey, Dr. Haywood expresses that whether it is learning a ‘can-do attitude’ from his supervisor or picking up fun new quirks such as ‘hoarding hand-me-down computer hardware,’ the School of Computer Science and his PhD research have given him the space to thrive for who he is:
I suspect I will always have a compulsive need to understand things deeply – but now I have the tools to harness that into computer systems research, and whether it is celebrating the wins at conference dinners with my peers, or consoling each other at the pub when it falls apart, it is hard to put words to the joy I have found in being part of a community that can match my passion, debate my technical points, and jump on board with my research tangent conversation starters.
It’s also very exciting to celebrate a success in privacy research. Many headlines are about data breaches and privacy failures, and so much research is about finding new privacy vulnerabilities. Being able to say “we made things better” is a great opportunity to inject some hope into the research community.
(Dr Gregor Haywood)
This elation also extends to the pride that both Dr. Henderson and Professor Bhatti feel towards having an alumnus from the School of Computer Science win this award. ‘It is a great honour’ they both expressed, and a fantastic example of the impact of research outside of the university. Dr. Henderson adds that within Computer Science, there are a number of dissertation awards, including SICSA and the BCS in the UK, as well as the ACM internationally. He encourages students to indulge in these opportunities, with Dr. Haywood noting that ‘participating in this and other inter-institutional networking events was a valuable way for me to broaden my research mindset throughout the PhD’ and if you are considering applying yourself or nominating a student for it, ‘do it! You have nothing to lose and plenty to gain. Remember it is the reviewers’ job to judge your work, not yours – you just need to judge whether you have time to submit.’
Dr. Haywood is now a Lecturer in the Department of Cybersecurity and Computing at Abertay University with key aspects of his work being available to read online until his thesis is published in June 2026.
ILNP web page: https://ilnp.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk
Blog written by Nina Globerson
We are seeking a scholar with a growing international research reputation in Computer Science and a commitment to delivering high-quality teaching within the broad field of Computer Communications and Networking, including Internet-based systems and Security.
For more information, please take a look at the University Website:
https://lnkd.in/eBqfK2NN
The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 20th June at 2PM in JC 1.33a
Below are the Title and Abstract for Xinya’s talk – Please do come along if you are able.
Title: Invisible Health Clues in Everyday Handwriting
Abstract: Everyday handwriting may quietly reflect subtle changes in a person’s health. This project explores how natural writing patterns—such as stroke dynamics, pressure, and rhythm—can offer early indicators of motor or neurological conditions. Without relying on wearables or clinical tasks, the approach passively monitors handwriting during familiar, routine activities. By capturing and analyzing writing behaviour over time, it becomes possible to build personal baselines and detect meaningful deviations. This work envisions a privacy-preserving, low-effort way to integrate long-term health awareness into daily life.
3pm
Thursday 19th June
JC 1.33A
Please join us for a talk at Research Software Group seminar by our guest Dr Volodymyr Kharchenko from the Department of Economic Cybernetics at the Faculty of Information Technologies, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (https://nubip.edu.ua/en).
Talk title: Current research and collaboration opportunities with the Faculty of Information Technologies, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (https://nubip.edu.ua/en)
Abstract: Dr Volodymyr Kharchenko is the Head of the Department of Economic Cybernetics at the Faculty of Information Technologies, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (https://nubip.edu.ua/en). The scientific and innovative work of the faculty focuses on the areas of design, creation and implementation of modern information technologies in society and environmental management, in particular, on the development of methods and information technologies of agromonitoring using satellite image processing systems, the creation of a hybrid cloud-based informational and educational environment of the university, development and introduction of electronic agricultural advisory system of Ukraine, research of methods of processing big data, development of applied information systems in various subject areas. He will present these directions and outline opportunities for potential collaborations.
Staff and PGR students from the School enjoyed a grant-writing “away day” on Thursday 12th June. There were useful discussions on structure of UKRI grants, applications and assessment of grants. Lunch, cakes and refreshments were enjoyed by all!
The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 13th June at 2PM in JC 1.33a
Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Kyren and Zipei’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.
Kyren Fox
Title: Privacy and Trust on the Web
Abstract: Many web users use content blockers to block ads and privacy invasive trackers from the sites they visit. Due to their increasing popularity and the nature of a web funded by ads and tracking, ad-tech firms have resorted to more and more sophisticated countermeasures to evade these blocks that have created an arms race between the blockers and trackers. Since many content blockers rely on community curated filter-lists that require laborious manual review, combined with the increasingly dynamic obfuscation techniques utilised by trackers to evade these blocks, issues surrounding the scalability of content blockers have arisen.
While many automated solutions have been proposed to assist in blocking unwanted privacy-harming functionality, there is still no comprehensive solution that tackles all privacy-invasive behaviours, avoids breaking legitimate website functionality, and is robust to evasion techniques. Existing solutions all have trade-offs but do not appear to offer the user any control over what trade-off they wish to make. This project will seek to demonstrate that it is possible to give users control over the granularity of trade-off they wish to make that will satisfy the trade-offs in a scalable and robust manner for their use case.
Zipei Li
Title: Understanding the Planning Capabilities and Limitations of LLMs in Blocks World.
Abstract: We investigates the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the symbolic Blocks World domain. While prior work has shown that LLMs often fail to generate correct or executable plans, we shift focus toward understanding the causes of plan failures and identifying the conditions under which LLMs succeed. We evaluate a range of LLMs across problems of varying difficulty and four prompt types with varying degrees of information in natural language. To support this analysis, we introduce a fine-grained failure category spanning Plan, Goal, State, and Action. The analysis deepens our understanding of LLM planning behavior and contributes an empirical framework for diagnosing failure modes, thereby informing the development of more reliable LLM-based planning systems.
The School held an informal social event for PGT students and staff on Monday 9th June in the Jack Cole coffee area to mark the dissertation period. Those attending enjoyed pizzas, snacks and drinks.
We’re thrilled to share some fantastic news and congratulate Saleem on being selected as one of the recipients of the ICANN Grant Program for his project: “Deployability of ILNP at Global Scale.”
The announcement was officially made by ICANN on May 29, 2025, as part of their first-ever cohort of grant recipients. You can read the full announcement here.
This is a major achievement and a testament to Saleem’s dedication. Once again, congratulations, Saleem!
The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 30th May at 2PM in JC 1.33a
Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Lina and Victor’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.
Lina Hadji-Kyriacou
Title: Context-PEFT: Efficient Cross-Domain Transfer Learning
Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques such as LoRA, BitFit and IA3 have demonstrated comparable performance to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models for specific downstream tasks, all while demanding significantly fewer trainable parameters and reduced GPU memory consumption. However, in the context of cross-domain transfer learning, the need for architectural modifications or full fine-tuning often becomes apparent. To address this we propose Context-PEFT, which learns different groups of adaptor parameters based on the current input domain. This approach enables LoRA-like weight injection without requiring additional architectural changes. Our method is evaluated on the COCO captioning task, where it outperforms full fine-tuning under similar data constraints while simultaneously offering a substantially more parameter-efficient and computationally economical solution.
Victor Yuan
Title: Methodologies for Creating Interactive and Lifelike Historical Characters Based on MetaHuman
Abstract: Virtual characters have long held promise as pedagogical tools in heritage education, particularly for creating immersive interactions with historical figures. Researchers have envisioned systems capable of emulating these figures, enabling users to engage in life-like, face-to-face dialogues over time. While technological constraints historically limited such applications, recent advancements in computational graphics and language models have now made them viable. This paper presents a framework for constructing interactive virtual character systems, outlining their core components through two critical dimensions: photorealism and interaction. The photorealism dimension leverages modern graphics tools to achieve high-fidelity visual representation, while the interaction dimension utilizes language models to enable socially believable and contextually responsive dialogue. We examine the necessity of each component and analyze available technological solutions with their respective trade-offs. Beyond the technical framework, we discuss potential future improvements and address ethical and practical concerns inherent to such systems. By synthesizing current technologies and their applicability, this work provides institutions with practical guidance for developing customized interactive systems that balance functionality with cost-efficiency.
