Overview

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the HCC group, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, working with Prof. Sir Nigel Shadbolt and Prof. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (at the EWADA project), on user-centered data usage control and user-centered AI, on decentralized Web or alike contexts, especially SoLiD (Social Linked Data).
Prior to this, I obtained PhD degree from AIAI, School of Informatics, the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Prof. Malcolm Atkinson, Dr. Petros Papapanagiotou and Prof. Jacques Fleuriot.

In general, my research surrounds data governance, data usage control and data privacy, especially in decentralized / multi-stakeholder contexts. It mainly concerns the technical mechanism design, but also considers user perspectives and expectations.
(Neural-)Symbolic AI, Knowledge Graph and Privacy-Enhancing Technology are the main topics for the technical parts. Data, accountability and user (empowerment) are the main factors.

See also here for my CV.

Details

The following main themes are covered in my research:

1. Usage Control / Data Terms of Use (DToU): How do we make data usage more accountable and controllable (and easy), for all stakeholders, especially regular people? [ref]
   • Regulatory / Compliance: what is the status quo, and (how) can we improve that?
2. Data privacy: How to securely and efficiently use multiple users’ data (collaboratively) in a decentralised data architecture, without losing autonomy? [ref]
3. GenAI: What challenges and opportunities do Large-Language Models (LLMs) or personal agents bring (to facilitate people)? [ref]
   • See also Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s design notes on this topic
4. User perception: how do users perceive (the issues of) data and how can we facilitate them?

Feel interested? Find out more from my papers.

Student Supervision

I [co-]supervise several master, bachelor and intern students. They work[ed] on various interesting topics.

Master & Bachelor Thesis

• Esther Miles [2025, Part C (Bachelor + Master)]
  Data Terms of Use: Annotating Health and Wellness Data in Privacy Policies
• Vladyslav Melnychuk [2024, Master]
  Bridging Real-World Policies and a Formal Data Terms of Use Language
• Rithvik Chatterjee [2024, Part C (Bachelor + Master)]
  User Interface for supporting users’ data autonomy in a fitness tracking application
• Emilia Folta [2024, Part C (Bachelor + Master)]
  User Interface for understanding the effect of data autonomy on social media user experience
• Vishal Ramesh [2023, Master]
  Improving the Scalability of Privacy-Friendly Synthetic Data Generation in Solid
• Yuexuan Li [2020, Master]
  Evaluating MongoDB’s suitability for knowledge bases

Interns

• Clerie Gilbert [2024]
  JurisMetrix: User expectation expression and EdTech platform policy analysis using DToU
• Yushi Yang [2023]
  SolidFlix++: Decentralized collaborative filtering for movie recommendation on Solid
• Zimeng Zhou [2022]
  KNoodle + Orchestrator: Calendar syncthing and meeting scheduling on Solid and existing servers

Other

Linking back to PhD work

The DToU topic bridges back with my PhD work on modelling and reasoning of data-use policies, in research / collaboration contexts (e.g. e-Science, scientific workflows), with MIMO workflows. See my previous research homepage for more details if interested.