Systems and Algorithms Laboratory (SysAL)
Welcome to the Systems and Algorithms Laboratory (SysAL)
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March 2023: Lot's of updates coming soon ... watch this space!
June 2021: We won the Best Paper Award at ACM MobiSys 2021. Check out PPFL code and data, Video. Congratulations to Fan and Minos!
May 2021: Our team, led by Anna Maria Mandalari, Daniel J. Dubois, and David Choffnes, has won one of the TOP 10 spots in the Telekom Challenge Development Stream. We are receiving a generous gift to develop IoTrim. Stay tuned for more news!
May 2021: Our paper “Blocking without Breaking: Identification and Mitigation of Non-Essential IoT Traffi” with Anna Maria Mandalari, Daniel J. Dubois, Roman Kolcun, Muhammad Talha Paracha, and David Choffnes” had been accepted to the 21st Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2021). Congrats all! (Paper and code available on IoTrim)
March 2021: Our paper "PPFL: Privacy-preserving Federated Learning with Trusted Execution Environments" with Fan Mo, Kleomenis Katevas, Eduard Marin, Diego Perino, and Nicolas Kourtellis has been accepted to The 19th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2021), Congratulations Fan!
January 2021: Dr Mohammad Malekzadeh has passed his PhD viva. Congrats Mohammad.
December 2020: Hamed Haddadi deliverd the Keynote talk at ACM CoNext 2020, titled “Towards ‘trustworthy-by-design’ networked systems”.
November 2020: Xavier Cadet joins us as a new PhD student interested in Artificial Intelligence for Health, funded by the UKRI CDT in AI for Healthcare.
October 2020: Hamed Haddadi was interviewed by Privacy Collective on online privacy and the case of Amazon. Read the full report here.
September 2020: We took part in preparing the Government Office for Science’s report on the Future of Citizen Data Systems, published alongside the National Data Strategy consultation.
September 2020: Our paper “Privacy-preserving Voice Analysis via Disentangled Representations” with Ranya Aloufi, Hamed Haddadi, and David Boyle has been accepted to The ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop (CCSW 2020), in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2020. Congratulations Ranya!
August 2020: Our paper “A Haystack Full of Needles: Scalable Detection of IoT Devices in the Wild” with Said Jawad Saidi, Anna Maria Mandalari, Roman Kolcun, Daniel J. Dubois, David Choffnes, Georgios Smaragdakis, Anja Feldmann, has been accepted to the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2020.
August 2020: We are hiring! Applications are invited for a Research Associate position on communication and navigation for autonomous drones as part of the UKRI-NSF Signals in the Soil funded Wireless In-Situ Soil Sensing Network for Future Sustainable Agriculture project at Imperial College London. (Advert)
June 2020: We welcome Debbie Zhang, Danni Shi, and Hanyang Liu to our group this summer, they are joining us (virtually!) this summer as UROP students from Imperial EEE and Imperial DoC.
May 2020: Our paper “When Speakers Are All Ears: Characterizing Misactivations of IoT Smart Speakers” with Daniel J. Dubois, Roman Kolcun, Anna Maria Mandalari, Muhammad Talha Paracha, and David Choffnes has been accepted to the 20th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2020), July 14–18, 2020. (paper, NYTimes, The Independent, and USA Today, BBC Panorama program Youtube Link, BBC News, Channel 4 The Truth About Amazon, NYT lead editorial)
May 2020: We have some internships available – each being funded for 12 weeks and aimed at undergraduate students and current postgraduate students. Please apply via Horizon
April 2020: Our research on security and privacy of smart speakers is featured on the NYT lead editorial.
March 2020: Ourpaper “DarkneTZ: Towards Model Privacy at the Edge using Trusted Execution Environments”, with Fan Mo, Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, Kleomenis Katevas, Soteris Demetriou, Ilias Leontiadis, and Andrea Cavallaro has been accepted to 18th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2020) June 2020, Toronto, Canada. Congrats Fan!
February 2020: Our research on security and privacy of Amazon devices is featured on BBC Panorama program (Youtube Link, BBC News)
February 2020: Our joint research with Northeastern University team on security and privacy risks of smart speakers has appeared on NYTimes, The Independent, and USA Today (full report).
January 2020: Our research on security and privacy risks of smart speakers has appeared on Which.
February 2019: Our research on IoT privacy and security was featured on the Italian RAI channel. (program link)
January 2019: Eman Maali joins SysAL as a PhD student. Welcome Eman!
January 2019: Our paper “Privacy-Preserving Bandits” has been acccepted to the Third Conference on Machine Learning and Systems (MLSys 2020), March 2020, Austin, USA. Congrats Mohammad.
December 2019: Our paper “Privacy-Preserving Deep Inference for Rich User Data on The Cloud” has been accepted to IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2020. (paper, Code)
November 2019: Minos and Ranya have won the Best Demo and the Best Poster awards respectively at ACM SenSys 2019. Congratulations both!
October 2019: Yuchen Zhao joins us as a postdoctoral researcher on the UK DRI Care Research & Technology programme.
September 2019: Our paper “BatteryLab, A Distributed Power Monitoring Platform For Mobile Devices” has been accepted to Eighteenth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2019) (Paper Available on ArXiv).
Septempber 2019: We participated in preperaing the government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation first series of three snapshot papers on ethical issues in AI including Smart Speakers and Voice Assistants.
August 2019: Ranya’s paper “Emotionless: Privacy-Preserving Speech Analysis for Voice Assistants”, appearing in ACM CCS 2019 Privacy Preserving Machine Learning workshop, has been covered in articles on Vice and Medium.
July 2019: Our study of IoT devices, “Information Exposure From Consumer IoT Devices: A Multidimensional, Network-Informed Measurement Approach” has been accepted to ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2019) (Community Contribution Award). (paper and code and dataset, Financial Times article, The Times article, Vice article, Ars Technica)
July 2019: We are Building Systems for Privacy-Preserving Data Analytics, Machine Learning, and behavioural interaction systems, as part of the newly funded £20M new Care Research & Technology Centre at Imperial College. Read about it here on the FT: How smart tech is helping people with dementia
June 2019: The first evolution of Databox Project is released as the BBC Box. We are really excited about this development and its potential to improve individuals’ privacy. This is part of the Personal Data Stewardship project at the BBC R&D. (Also on BBC News, Gizmodo
May 2019: Our research on IoT privacy and security is featured in the BBC Click program on GDPR Anniversariy.
May 2019: BBC Box, a Databox-driven product we are collaborating on, will be released soon! Watch this space for the progress.
January 2019: Ranya J.Aloufi joins SysAL as a PhD student. Welcome Ranya!
January 2019: We are part of the new £20m UK DRI Care Research & Technology programme, developing privacy-preserving technologies for demantia patients over the next six years. Job ads will be out soon!
December 2018: Our article "Decentralised AI has the potential to upend the online economy" has been published in Wired.
December 2018: Databox Project has been featured as a case study at the Royal Academy of Engineering report “Towards trusted data sharing: guidance and case studies”.
November 2018: Anna Maria Mandalari joins SysAL as a postdoctoral researcher on the Databox project. Welcome Anna!
October 2018: Our paper “Deep Private-Feature Extraction” has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
October 2018: Fan Mo and Yuting Zhan have started their PhD research with us in Imperial SysAL. Welcome to the team!
August 2018: We are looking for a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the DADA Project to join our lab. See the job advert and apply by 9th September.
August 2018: We have a fully funded PhD Studentship in Designing Cyber-Physical Systems for UK/EU students. Apply by 30th September 2018.
August 2018: We are looking for a Chair or Reader with Expertise in an area relevant to Cyber Physical Systems Design. See the job advert and apply by 9th September.
August 2018: We have received a generous grant from Huawei Technologies. Stay Tuned for the job advert!
March 2018: Our EPSRC TIPS2 grant on Defense Against Dark Artefacts, to battle IoT security & Privacy threats using edge computing, has been funded. (EPSRC Ref, Press Release)
March 2018: Our EPSRC Digital Economy NetworkPlus grant on Human-Data Interactionhas been funded! Watch out for announcements regarding events and calls for projects in this space. (EPSRC Ref, Press Release)
Feb 2018: Our paper “Private and Scalable Personal Data Analytics using a Hybrid Edge-Cloud Deep Learning” with Seyed Ali Osia, Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, Ali Taheri, and Hamid R. Rabiee has been accepted to the IEEE Computer Magazine Special Issue on Mobile and Embedded Deep Learning.
Jan 2018: Two papers on privacy in IoT applications have been accepted to the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation 2018. See publications’ page for details.
Jan 2018: We have received a Microsoft Azure Research Award to support our Machine Learning research for the Databox project.
Projects
Current Grants:
- MIT-Imperial Seed Fund , $100K, Starting October 2021
- EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award to develop IoTrim, £100K, Starting April 2021
- Human-Data Interaction, Legibility, Agency, Negotiability: EPSRC Network Plus grant (EP/R045178/1, £1,040,837 starting July 2018)
- EPSRC DADA: Defence Against Dark Artefacts (EP/R03351X/1, £1,011,787 starting July 2018)
- UK DRI Care Research & Technology programme (£20m starting June 2019)
Past Grants:
- Microsoft Azure Research Award 2017-2019 (CRM:0740917)
- EPSRC Databox: Privacy-Aware Infrastructure for Managing Personal Data (EP/N028260/1 £1,238,585 starting October 2016)