Siamak “Sia” Shahandashti is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) and Head of the Cyber Security and Privacy Research Group at the Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK. Sia’s expertise is in applied cryptography, data protection, human factors in cyber security, and AI security and privacy.
Sia was a member of the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PET) Expert Forum which developed the ICO’s PET guidance during 2021–2022. He co-designed the first verifiable electronic voting system trialled in the UK (in Gateshead) alongside the 2020 General Election. He was part of a team that discovered vulnerabilities in major mobile browsers, leading to security patches by the likes of Apple and Google, making billions of mobile users safer every day.
Sia has previously co-led the Protecting Minority Ethnic Communities Online (PRIME) project (see www.primecommunities.online) which, among other outputs, produced evidence-based policy briefings presented to members of the Scottish parliament. He currently co-leads the Participatory Harm Auditing Workbenches and Methodologies (PHAWM) project (see www.phawm.org), investigating how participatory auditing can mitigate the possible harms of AI-based services.
For more information, please see his homepage: www.cs.york.ac.uk/~siamak
