Professor Wendy Moncur

Computer and Information Sciences

Contact

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Personal statement

I lead the Cybersecurity Group in Computer & Information Sciences. My research focus is on human factors in cybersecurity, and on trust, identity, privacy and security. I collaborate across disciplines, and am adept at translating between them. Before becoming an academic, I worked in Fintech, Utilities and manufacturing as a database designer, analyst and programmer. I currently teach on the MSc GA Cybersecurity (CS811), and supervise 4th year research projects. I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students with relevant interests.

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Teaching

Wendy has supervised the following PhD students to completion:

She currently teaches on the Graduate Apprentice MSc in Cybersecurity, and supervises undergraduate and Mc dissertations.

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Professional Activities

UK and The World in 2025
Participant
30/1/2025
A Design Oriented Adaptation of the Thematic Analysis Method for Use in HCI
Examiner
3/11/2024
Guidelines for academics aim to lessen ethical pitfalls in generative-AI use
Recipient
22/5/2024
AI-Driven Approaches for Privacy Compliance: Enhancing Adherence to Privacy Regulations
Examiner
13/5/2024
Privacy Risks and Legal Challenges in the Emergent Use of Generative AI in Research with Participant Data
Speaker
24/4/2024
Operational training for enhanced maritime cyber resilience- Bridging safety and security through maritime education and training
Examiner
20/3/2024

More professional activities

Projects

Addressing Privacy Risks and Legal Challenges in the Emergent Use of Text-based Generative AI for UK Research (REPHRAIN)
Moncur, Wendy (Principal Investigator) Farooq, Ali (Co-investigator) Farooq, Ali (Co-investigator) Gibson, Ryan Colin (Research Co-investigator) Gibson, Ryan Colin (Research Co-investigator)
01-Jan-2023 - 31-Jan-2024
AP4L: Adaptive PETs to Protect & emPower People during Life Transitions
Moncur, Wendy (Principal Investigator) English, Rosanne (Academic) Renaud, Karen (Co-investigator) Yan, Jeff (Co-investigator)
AP4L 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

To ensure a breadth of understanding, we will apply these concepts to four very different transitions through a series of carefully designed co-creation activities, devised as part of a stakeholder workshop held in Oct'21. These are relationship breakdowns; LBGT+ transitions or transitioning gender; entering/ leaving employment in the Armed Forces; and developing a serious illness or becoming terminally ill. Such transitions can significantly change privacy considerations in unanticipated or counter-intuitive ways. For example, previously enabled location-sharing with a partner may lead to stalking after a breakup; 'coming out' may need careful management across diverse audiences (e.g - friends, grandparents) on social media.

We will study these transitions, following a creative security approach, bringing together interdisciplinary expertise in Computer Science, Law, Business, Psychology and Criminology.

We will systematise this knowledge, and develop fundamental models of the nature of transitions and their interplay with online lives. These models will inform the development of a suite of technologies and solutions that will help people navigate significant life transitions through adaptive, personalised privacy-enhanced interventions that meet the needs of each individual and bolster their resilience, autonomy, competence and connection. The suite will comprise:

(1) "Risk Playgrounds", which will build resilience by helping users to explore potentially risky interactions of life transitions with privacy settings across their digital footprint in safe ways

(2) "Transition Guardians", which will provide real-time protection for users during life transitions.

(3) "Security Bubbles", which will promote connection by bringing people together who can help each other (or who need to work together) during one person's life transition, whilst providing additional guarantees to safeguard everyone involved.

In achieving this vision, and as evidenced by £686K of in-kind contributions, we will work with 26 core partners spanning legal enforcement agencies (e.g., Surrey Police), tech companies (e.g., Facebook, IBM), support networks (e.g., LGBT Foundation, Revenge Porn Helpline) and associated organisations (e.g., Ofcom, Mastercard, BBC). Impact will be delivered through various activities including a specially commissioned BBC series on online life transitions to share knowledge with the public; use of the outputs of our projects by companies & social platforms (e.g., by incorporating into their products, & by designing their products to take into consideration the findings of our project) & targeted workshops to enable knowledge exchange with partners & stakeholders.
01-Jan-2022 - 31-Jan-2025
Digital Power of Attorney
Moncur, Wendy (Principal Investigator) Graham, Martin (Post Grad Student)
01-Jan-2021 - 01-Jan-2024
Cumulative Revelations of Personal Data (Wendy Moncur transfer)
Moncur, Wendy (Principal Investigator)
Cumulative Revelations in Personal Data takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating how small, apparently innocuous pieces of employees' personal information, which are generated through interactions with/in networked systems over time, collectively pose significant yet unanticipated risk to personal reputation and employers' operational security. Such cumulative revelations come from personal data that are shared intentionally by an individual, from data shared about an individual by others, from recognition software that identifies and tags people and places automatically, and from common cross-authentication practices that favour convenience over security (e.g. signing into AirBnB via Facebook). Brought together, these data can provide unintended insights to others into (for example) an individual's personal habits, work patterns, personality, emotion, and social influence. Collectively these data thus have the potential to create adverse consequences for that individual (e.g. through reputational damage), their employer (e.g. by creating opportunities for cybercrime), and even for national security.

The research brings together multidisciplinary expertise in Socio-Digital Interaction, Co-design, Interactive Information Retrieval, and Computational Legal Theory, all working in collaboration with a key industry partner, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which employs more than 92,000 staff across 12 national, international and private banks and for which security concerns are paramount, as well as UK Government security agencies, via the Government Office for Science and the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats.

The research will examine the potential adverse revelations delivered by an individual employee's holistic digital footprint through the development of a prototype software tool that maps out a portrait of a user's digital footprint and reflects it back to them. This tool will enable individuals to understand the cumulative nature of their personal data, and better comprehend the associated vulnerabilities and risks. Responding to employers' concerns over organisational security risks created by cumulative revelations of their employees' data, the research will also identify conflicts and ambiguities in security service design and implementation when the motivations and actions of individual employees are balanced against organisational security philosophy, enabling mitigation against the attendant risks, issues and consequences of cumulative revelations from organisational and individual perspectives.

31-Jan-2020 - 30-Jan-2022
TAPESTRY: Trust, Authentication and Privacy over a DeCentralised Social Registry
Moncur, Wendy (Principal Investigator)
01-Jan-2017 - 30-Jan-2020

More projects

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Contact

Professor Wendy Moncur
Computer and Information Sciences

Email: wendy.moncur@strath.ac.uk
Tel: Unlisted