AP4L (Adaptive PETs to Protect & emPower People during Life Transitions) is a 3-year program of interdisciplinary research, centring on the online privacy & vulnerability challenges that people face when going through major life transitions. Our central goal is to develop privacy-by-design technologies to protect & empower people during these transitions. Our work is driven by a narrative that will be familiar to most people. Life often “just happens”, leading people to overlook their core privacy and online safety needs. For instance, somebody undergoing cancer treatment may be less likely to finesse their privacy setting on social media when discussing the topic. Similarly, an individual undergoing gender transition may be unaware of how their online activities in the past may shape the treatment into the future. This project will build the scientific and theoretical foundations to explore these challenges, as well as design and evaluate three core innovations that will address the identified challenges. AP4L will introduce a step-change, making online safety and privacy as painless and seamless as possible during life transitions

1. Jinyang Li, Zhenyu Li, Qinghua Wu, Gareth Tyson. On Uploading Behavior and Optimizations of a Mobile Live Streaming Service. In 41st IEEE Joint Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) (2022). [Acceptance Rate: 19%]

Anaobi Ishaku Hassan, Aravindh Raman, Ignacio Castro, Haris Bin Zia, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nishanth Sastry and Gareth Tyson. Exploring Content Moderation in the Decentralised Web: The Pleroma Case. In 17th ACM International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), Munich, Germany (2021). [Acceptance Rate: 22%]

1. Ting Liu, Tianhao Miao, Qinghua Wu, Zhenyu Li, Guangxin He, Jiaoren Wu, Xingwu Yang and Gareth Tyson. Demystifying Scaling Performance Bottlenecks in Distributed Deep Learning. In 31st ACM Web Conference (WWW), Lyon, France (2022). [Acceptance Rate: 17%]
2. Pushkal Agarwal, Aravindh Raman, Kiran Garimella, Damiola Ibosiola, Gareth Tyson and Nishanth Sastry. Jettisoning Junk Messaging in the Era of End-to-End Encryption: A Case Study of WhatsApp. In 31st ACM Web Conference (WWW), Lyon, France (2022). [Acceptance Rate: 17%]
3. Ehsan Ul Haq, Tristan Braud, Lik Hang Lee, Anish Krishna Vallapuram, Yue Yu, Gareth Tyson and Pan Hui. Short, Colorful, and Irreverent! A Comparative Analysis of New Users on WallstreetBets During the Gamestop Short-squeeze. In 31st ACM Web Conference (WWW), Lyon, France (2022). [Acceptance Rate: 17%]