Opportunities

I am often looking for motivated and exceptional PhD students and research interns to join my team, at King’s College London. If you are keen on privacy and security research at the intersection of HCI, behavioural or social sciences, that enables and betters people’s lives and impact for specific user communities, have a look at the opportunities below.👇

📢🔔Currently Recruiting for: 👩‍🎓🧑‍🎓📚💼✍️

• 1 Postdoctoral Research Associate
• PhD Students
• Research Interns

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Human-Centred Privacy and Security

The successful candidate will join King’s College London to work with Kovila on the EPSRC-funded project AGENCY. The job advert via jobs.ac.uk can be found here, or alternatively via King’s application portal here.

The RA’s project will investigate a particular technology-enabled online harm context, such as in relation to Intimate Health Care, Femtech or Intimate Image Sharing. It will focus on a particular user community or population, to examine the socio-technical factors and interaction dynamics that contribute to complex harm situations or to mitigating harms.

PhD Project with Me (in Human-Centred Privacy and Security)

I am looking to recruit excellent PhD students to join my team, at King’s College London.

If you are a prospective PhD candidate with a keen interest in research at the intersection of privacy/security and HCI, behavioural or social sciences, (1) have a look at the project topics, that I am interested to supervise, as listed below, (2) send me an email at kovila.coopamootoo@kcl.ac.uk to describe your interest and share your academic profile details, and (3) make an application on King’s Application Portal.

Project Topic 1: Inclusive Privacy & Security

Privacy, security, digital safety are often designed for majority or WEIRD populations, thereby not appropriately serving all user communities (minority, with specific needs, or life situations), and risk discriminating access and appropriate engagement, while also creating concerns for them. The PhD project will focus on a (type of) privacy, security or digital safety context and seek better privacy/security design with and for at-risk communities, such as addressing

• Privacy for women and queer communities for e.g. in online platforms
• Authentication for the visually impaired
• Digital safety for socio-economically deprived communities (where privacy/security is often traded-off for more pressing life needs)
• Privacy and digital safety programmes for adult digital starters (often from deprived or minority populations, or experiencing the digital generational divide)
• Privacy and security of refugees and migrants

Proposed PhD projects will involve a mix of qualitative, participatory research and community-centred research. The projects can involve working with stakeholders such as charities, NGOs that support vulnerable and marginalised groups and victim-survivors, as well as digital safety advocacy.

Project Topic 2: Mitigating Technology-Enabled Harms

There are growing examples of technology originally designed to enhance quality of life being mis-used to facilitate abuse, online harms and in-security. The PhD project will investigate a particular context of technology-enabled harm in intersection with the user characteristic or life event that amplifies the chances of being targeted or in experiencing online harms (e.g. gender, age, life style preference, health condition, breakdown of relationship), such as

• Online platforms being used for hate and harassment of women, queer communities, or race minorities. This can address how platforms (are required to) mitigate harm and content moderation.
• Smart homes enabling intimate partner abuse
• Digital health and wellbeing technology involving excessive tracking and privacy invasion (e.g. Femtech, sports apps)
• Online platform’s poor content moderation and lack of age-appropriate controls that threaten children’s online safety
• Content sharing platform used for non-consensual intimate image distribution

Proposed PhD projects will aim to understand the lived experiences of users, make recommendations and prototype for safer/harm-mitigating experiences. Specifically, the project will look into the behavioural dynamics of interacting with such technologies (or human-computer interaction – HCI) and the design aspects, via suitable user-studies such as interviews, surveys, participatory workshops, or ethnography research methods.

Project Topic 3: Private and Safe Chatbot/GPT Interactions

We are welcoming projects along this topic.

Funding Options

• Fully-funded positions for exceptional candidates through King’s scholarships. These funding allocations are for full fees and a living stipend (London weighted). This applies to both home and international candidates.
• King’s China Scholarships (for Chinese nationals). These funding allocations are for full fees and a living stipend (London weighted).
• Alternative funding: if you are keen to do a PhD but are not sure how to fund, or wish to self-fund, I am happy to work towards putting together applications for PhD fellowships for exceptional candidates, along the lines of the 3 project topics described above.

Research Interns and Visitors

The Privacy and Security for User Communities Lab welcomes visiting PhD students as interns and PostDocs (who can visit with their own funding), where the selection will be based on interests matching the Lab and capacity. Have a look at the Visiting Researcher Program at King’s College London, reach out to me (via email) and make an application.