Overview
Background
Professor Ryan Ko is Chair and Director of UQ Cyber Research Centre, Director of Research at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and an elected member of the Academic Board at the University of Queensland, Australia. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Engineering)(Hons.) (2005), and PhD (2011) from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Ko has held senior scientific leadership, executive, and directorship roles across industry and academia, and has more than a decade of board, governance and advisory experience across government, industry and NGOs across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and USA.
He currently serves on the Audit and Risk Committee for the board of the global not-for-profit ORCID, and has served on boards and advisory groups for AustCyber, Queensland Government, Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), and the NZX-listed (NZE:LIC) Livestock Improvement Cooperation (LIC).
He has also served as expert advisor to INTERPOL, the government of Tonga, NZDF, NZ Minister for Communications' Cyber Security Skills Taskforce, and one of four nationally-appointed Technical Adviser for the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015, Ministry of Justice. He has also served as independent technical expert for court cases.
He is also Adjunct Professor at the Singapore Institute of Technology, and Affiliate Faculty Member at NIATEC at the Idaho State University, USA.
He is co-founder of Dynamic Standards International (DSI), CyberCert, and First Watch Ltd (NZ) – an industrial cybersecurity spin-off based on his patented OT security and provenance research at the University of Waikato.
Since joining UQ in 2019, he has served as:
- Deputy Head of School (External Engagement) (2021-2022)
- Founding Discipline Leader of the Cyber Security and Software Engineering discipline (2020-2021)
- Group Leader - Cyber Security (2019)
Ko has successfully established several university-wide, multi-disciplinary academic research and education programmes, including establishing and leading:
- UQ Cyber - interdisciplinary cyber scurity research centre involving 60+ academics and their respective teams from the 6 Schools (EECS, Business, Economics, Law, Social Science, Mathematics & Physics), the Centre for Policy Futures, and 4 Faculties since 2019.
- UQ's interdisciplinary postgraduate programme (MCyber, PGDipCyber, GCertCyber) involving four UQ faculties in 2019,
- NZ's first cyber security graduate research programme and lab (Cybersecurity Researchers of Waikato (CROW)) in 2012,
- NZ's first Master of Cyber Security (encompassing technical and law courses), the NZ Cyber Security Challenge since 2014, and
- NZ Institute for Security and Crime Science – Te Puna Haumaru as its founding director, the Evidence Based Policing Centre (at Wellington with NZ Police and ESR), and Master of Security and Crime Science in 2017 with the University of Waikato, NZ.
Over his academic career, Ko has been awarded A$20+million in competitive grants as lead Chief Investigator, and ~A$40+million as co-investigator. Prior to UQ, he was the highest funded computer scientist in New Zealand, as Principal Investigator and Science Leader of the largest MBIE-awarded cloud security research funding for STRATUS (NZ$12.2 million; 2014-2018). STRATUS' research was awarded 'Gold' by MBIE (i.e. top performing project, 2017), adopted by INTERPOL and featured in NZ's Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet's NZ Cyber Security Strategy 2016 annual report.
Ko has a track record developing international and national cyber security curricula, including:
- Co-creation of the gold-standard (ISC)2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) curriculum (2014-2015)
- Authoring the draft of the NZQA's Level 6 Cybersecurity Diploma qualification as part of the NZ Cyber Security Skills Taskforce on behalf of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Ko has also experience developing competitions and coaching competitive cyber security teams, including:
- Co-founding the NZ Cyber Security Challenge in 2014, and leading the NZCSC from 2014 to 2018. NZCSC is now the premier national cyber security competition in NZ.
- Co-founding the Oceania Cybersecurity Challenge (OCC) in 2020, and leading the competition from 2022 to present. OCC is now the regional qualifiers for the International Cybersecurity Challenge
- Co-founding the International Cybersecurity Challenge (ICC) as part of the Steering Committee in 2022. ICC has been held in Athens (2022) and San Diego (2023). It is aiming to be the world cup of cyber competitions.
- Head Coach of Team Oceania for the ICC. 2022 Results: Overall 4th; 2023 Results: Overall 2nd in the world.
He contributed to the establishment of the Government of Tonga CERT and CERT NZ, and has spoken regularly on cyber and cloud security research across the globe, including the OECD, Republic of Korea National Assembly (2018), INTERPOL (2017), TEDx Ruakura (2017), and the NZ Members of Parliament (2016).
Within the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27, Prof Ko was Head of Delegation for the Singapore national body, served as Editor, ISO/IEC 21878 “Security guidelines for design and implementation of virtualized servers”, and hosted the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 meetings at Hamilton, NZ, in 2017. He is currently one of the editors of the ISO/IEC PWI 5181 Data Provenance Reference Model. In 2022, Ko co-chaired the development of the Singapore standard TR 106:2022 Tiered cybersecurity standards for enterprises in collaboration with the SPSTC and Singapore Cyber Security Agency.
Ko serves as an assessor for the Australian Research Council (ARC), Irish Research Council, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), and NZ MBIE College of Assessors (since 2015).
He is also an external expert for the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), and a member of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) Accreditation Committee. He has experience reviewing course proposals and served in governance roles for higher education institutes.
Ko has externally examined 11 PhD and 3 Masters theses for universities in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore.
For his contributions to the field, he was elected Fellow of the Australian Computer Society, Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) (2016). He was awarded the Singapore Government (Enterprise Singapore)’s Young Professional Award (2018) for his leadership at ISO, and awarded the inaugural CSA Ron Knode Service Award 2012 for the establishment of Cloud Data Governance and Cloud Vulnerabilities Research Working Groups. He is also recipient of the 2015 (ISC)2 Information Security Leadership Award.
For his research and teaching excellence, he was awarded the University of Queensland Awards for Excellence - Leadership (Commendation) (2023), EAIT Nominations for Most Effective Teacher (both semesters of 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023), University of Waikato's Early Career Excellence Award (2014), Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards (2014, 2015, 2018), and the Nola Campbell eLearning Excellence Award (2014). During his PhD, he was also awarded A*STAR SIMTech's Best Student Award (2009), and clinched the 1st Prize of the IEEE Services Cup 2009 at IEEE ICWS (CORE A*) in Los Angeles, CA.
Earlier in his career, Ko was a systems engineer, and subsequently founded two start-ups (one was a social enterprise which became an events/conventions management contractor with IMG at mega-events in Singapore, including the inaugural Youth Olympics in 2010).
He is an active science communicator and is regularly interviewed and featured by Australian (ABC News, SBS News, 7 News, 9 News, Courier Mail, Network 10, AFR), Singaporean (Channel NewsAsia, CNA Radio938), NZ (NZ Herald, Dominion Post, Stuff.co.nz, Waikato Times, TVNZ, Central TV) and international media on topics of cyber security, cybercrime and data privacy.
Availability
- Professor Ryan Ko is:
- Available for supervision
- Media expert
Fields of research
Qualifications
- Bachelor (Honours) of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University
- Doctor of Philosophy, Nanyang Technological University
- Certificate of Management, Harvard University
- Fellow, Australian Computer Society, Australian Computer Society
- Fellow, Cloud Security Alliance, Cloud Security Alliance
- Fellow, Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences, Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences
Research interests
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Automating Cyber Security for Critical Infrastructure
Designing cyber autonomy to empower all end-users.
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Operational Technology (OT) Security
Focusing on Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and related protocols.
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Provenance and Traceability
Applications into AgTech, IoT, Edge, Cloud Computing and OT environments.
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Trusted Computing Applications
Applications into agriculture, regulatory, auditing and media.
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Data Privacy and Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Enabling secure and private multi-party computation.
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AI Planning/ Automated Planning
Adapting classical AI planning approaches into cyber security.
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Applying Situation Crime Prevention to Cybercrime Prevention
Applying SCP techniques into processes and controls to prevent cybercrime.
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Board and Organisational Structures for Cyber Resilience
Understanding how factors and pressures (e.g. board composition and organisational structures, external pressures) affect an organisation's cyber resilience.
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Creating Measurable Indicators of Cyber Resilience
Developing a framework to quantify factors allowing senior executives to understand and make decisions about cyber resilience.
Research impacts
Ko's research in cyber security focuses on returning control of data to users. His research reduces users' reliance on trusting third-parties and focusses on (1) provenance logging and reconstruction, traceability and (2) privacy-preserving data processing. His research is adopted internationally (e.g. CERN, INTERPOL, and HP clients such as Apple, Nasa, US Treasury/IRS). His papers have received conference Best Paper Awards (2011, 2015, 2017), and resulted in several technology transfers (e.g. HP), open source contributions (e.g. Kali Linux THC) and spin-offs (e.g. First Watch). He has published in top venues including WWW (The Web), NeurIPS, DCC, ESORICS, IEEE TrustCom, IEEE Comms Surveys and Tutorials, IEEE ICWS, IEEE TDSC, IEEE TSC, Computers & Security, IEEE Trans on Smart Grid, and more than 100 publications including books, refereed conference papers, journal papers, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries, technical reports and international patents (PCT).
Recently, he is researching information integrity and cyber autonomy in critical infrastructure sectors such as energy, manufacturing, regulatory and agriculture sectors. He has served in technical programme committees for more than 30 IEEE conferences/workshops, associate editor for 6 journals, and as series editor for Elsevier's security books.
Works
Search Professor Ryan Ko’s works on UQ eSpace
2017
Book Chapter
Distributing encoded data for private processing in the cloud
Will, Mark A. and Ko, Ryan K. L. (2017). Distributing encoded data for private processing in the cloud. Data security in cloud computing. (pp. 89-115) edited by Vimal Kumar, Sivadon Chaisiri and Ryan Ko. London, United Kingdom: The Institution of Engineering and Technology. doi: 10.1049/pbse007e_ch5
2017
Conference Publication
Secure FPGA as a service - towards secure data processing by physicalizing the cloud
Will, Mark A. and Ko, Ryan K. L. (2017). Secure FPGA as a service - towards secure data processing by physicalizing the cloud. 16th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications / The 11th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering / The 14th IEEE International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems, Sydney, Australia, 1-4 August 2017. New York, NY, USA: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. doi: 10.1109/Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS.2017.270
2017
Book Chapter
Visualization and data provenance trends in decision support for cybersecurity
Garae, Jeffery and Ko, Ryan K. L. (2017). Visualization and data provenance trends in decision support for cybersecurity. Data analytics and decision support for cybersecurity: trends, methodologies and applications. (pp. 243-270) edited by Iván Palomares Carrascosa, Harsha Kumara Kalutarage and Yan Huang. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-59439-2_9
2017
Journal Article
Malware propagation and prevention model for time-varying community networks within software defined networks
Liu, Lan, Ko, Ryan K. L., Ren, Guangming and Xu, Xiaoping (2017). Malware propagation and prevention model for time-varying community networks within software defined networks. Security and Communication Networks, 2017 2910310, 1-8. doi: 10.1155/2017/2910310
2017
Conference Publication
Returning control of data to users with a personal information crunch - a position paper
Will, Mark A., Garae, Jeffery, Tan, Yu Shyang, Scoon, Craig and Ko, Ryan K. L. (2017). Returning control of data to users with a personal information crunch - a position paper. 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing Research and Innovation (ICCCRI), Singapore, 11-12 April 2017. Piscataway, NJ, United States: IEEE. doi: 10.1109/ICCCRI.2017.12
2017
Conference Publication
Anonymous Data Sharing Between Organisations with Elliptic Curve Cryptography
Will, Mark A., Ko, Ryan K. L. and Schlickmann, Silvino J. (2017). Anonymous Data Sharing Between Organisations with Elliptic Curve Cryptography. 2017 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS, Sydney, NSW Australia, 1-4 August 2017. Piscataway, NJ United States: IEEE. doi: 10.1109/trustcom/bigdatase/icess.2017.347
2017
Conference Publication
Visualizing the New Zealand cyber security challenge for attack behaviors
Garae, Jeffery, Ko, Ryan K. L., Kho, Janice, Suwadi, Saidah, Will, Mark A. and Apperley, Mark (2017). Visualizing the New Zealand cyber security challenge for attack behaviors. 16th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications / The 11th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering / The 14th IEEE International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 1 -4 August 2017. New York, NY, United States: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. doi: 10.1109/Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS.2017.362
2017
Conference Publication
Attribution using keyboard row based behavioural biometrics for handedness recognition
Shute, Sam, Ko, Ryan K. L. and Chaisiri, Sivadon (2017). Attribution using keyboard row based behavioural biometrics for handedness recognition. 2017 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 1 - 4 August 2017. New York, NY, United States: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. doi: 10.1109/Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS.2017.363
2017
Conference Publication
User-centric intelligence visualizations for ransomware propagation, bitcoin transactions and early cybercrime detection
Ko, Ryan K. L. and Garae, Jeffery (2017). User-centric intelligence visualizations for ransomware propagation, bitcoin transactions and early cybercrime detection. 3rd INTERPOL Digital Security Research Seminar, Singapore, 12-13 September 2017. Singapore: INTERPOL.
2016
Conference Publication
Taxonomy of Man-in-the-Middle attacks on HTTPS
Stricot-Tarboton, Shaun, Chaisiri, Sivadon and Ko, Ryan K. L. (2016). Taxonomy of Man-in-the-Middle attacks on HTTPS. 15th IEEE Int Conf on Trust, Security and Privacy in Comp and Commun / 10th IEEE Int Conf on Big Data Science and Engineering / 14th IEEE Int Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Proc with Applicat (IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA), Tianjin, China, 23-26 August 2016. New York, NY, United States: IEEE. doi: 10.1109/TrustCom.2016.105
2016
Conference Publication
From reactionary to proactive security: context-aware security policy management and optimization under uncertainty
Chaisiri, Sivadon and Ko, Ryan K. L. (2016). From reactionary to proactive security: context-aware security policy management and optimization under uncertainty. 15th IEEE Int Conf on Trust, Security and Privacy in Comp and Commun / 10th IEEE Int Conf on Big Data Science and Engineering / 14th IEEE Int Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Proc with Applicat (IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA), Tianjin, China, 23-26 August 2016. New York, NY, United States: IEEE. doi: 10.1109/TrustCom.2016.0107
2016
Conference Publication
The Data Privacy Matrix Project: Towards a Global Alignment of Data Privacy Laws
Scoon, Craig and Ko, Ryan K. L. (2016). The Data Privacy Matrix Project: Towards a Global Alignment of Data Privacy Laws. 15th IEEE Int Conf on Trust, Security and Privacy in Comp and Commun / 10th IEEE Int Conf on Big Data Science and Engineering / 14th IEEE Int Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Proc with Applicat (IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA), Tianjin, China, 23-26 August 2016. New York, NY, United States: IEEE. doi: 10.1109/TrustCom/2016.303
2016
Conference Publication
Privacy preserving computation by fragmenting individual bits and distributing gates
Will, Mark A., Ko, Ryan K. L. and Witten, Ian H. (2016). Privacy preserving computation by fragmenting individual bits and distributing gates. 15th IEEE Int Conf on Trust, Security and Privacy in Comp and Commun / 10th IEEE Int Conf on Big Data Science and Engineering / 14th IEEE Int Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Proc with Applicat (IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA), Tianjin, China, 23-26 August 2016. New York, NY, United States: IEEE. doi: 10.1109/TrustCom.2016.153
2016
Conference Publication
Message from the TSCloud 2016 Symposium Chairs
Ko, Ryan and Choo, Kim-Kwang Raymond (2016). Message from the TSCloud 2016 Symposium Chairs. IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA, Tianjin, China, 23-26 August 2016. Piscataway, NJ, United States: IEEE. doi: 10.1109/trustcom.2016.0015
2016
Conference Publication
UVisP: user-centric visualization of data provenance with Gestalt principles
Garae, Jeffery, Ko, Ryan K. L. and Chaisiri, Sivadon (2016). UVisP: user-centric visualization of data provenance with Gestalt principles. 15th IEEE Int Conf on Trust, Security and Privacy in Comp and Commun / 10th IEEE Int Conf on Big Data Science and Engineering / 14th IEEE Int Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Proc with Applicat (IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA), Tianjin, China, 23-26 August 2016. New York, NY, United States: IEEE. doi: 10.1109/TrustCom.2016.292
2016
Book
Security in computing and communications
Peter Mueller, Sabu M. Thampi, Md Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, Ryan Ko, Robin Doss and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero eds. (2016). Security in computing and communications. Communications in Computer and Information Science, Singapore: Springer Singapore. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2738-3
2016
Conference Publication
Preface
Mueller, Peter, Thampi, Sabu M., Alam Bhuiyan, Md. Zakirul, Ko, Ryan, Doss, Robin and Alcaraz Calero, Jose M. (2016). Preface. 4th International Symposium, SSCC 2016, Jaipur, India, September 21-24, 2016. Singapore: Springer.
2016
Conference Publication
Computing mod with a variable lookup table
Will, Mark A. and Ko, Ryan K. L. (2016). Computing mod with a variable lookup table. 4th International Symposium on Security in Computing and Communications (SSCC), Jaipur, India, 21-24 September 2016. Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2738-3_1
2016
Book
Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing
Jesus Carretero, Javier Garcia-Blas, Ryan K.L. Ko, Peter Mueller and Koji Nakano eds. (2016). Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-49583-5
2015
Journal Article
Preface
Ko, Ryan K.L. and Choo, Kim-Kwang Raymond (2015). Preface. The Cloud Security Ecosystem: Technical, Legal, Business and Management Issues. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-801595-7.09982-1
Funding
Current funding
Past funding
Supervision
Availability
- Professor Ryan Ko is:
- Available for supervision
Before you email them, read our advice on how to contact a supervisor.
Supervision history
Current supervision
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Doctor Philosophy
Evaluating and Enhancing the Resilience of Regression-Based Anomaly Detectors Against Gradient-Free Evasion Attacks in Industrial Control Systems
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Guangdong Bai, Dr Naipeng Dong
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Doctor Philosophy
Evaluating and Improving Type Inference Models for Web Application Reverse Engineering
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Mark Utting, Professor Michael Bruenig
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Doctor Philosophy
A Distributed Data Collection Infrastructure For Automating Industrial Control Systems Security
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Guangdong Bai, Dr Naipeng Dong
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Doctor Philosophy
Distributed data collection infrastructure for IT and OT networks for automated early warning detection
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Guangdong Bai, Dr Naipeng Dong
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Doctor Philosophy
Distributed data collection infrastructure for IT and OT networks for automated early warning detection
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Guangdong Bai, Dr Naipeng Dong
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Doctor Philosophy
Secure, Accountable and Provenance-Centric File System
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Guangdong Bai
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Doctor Philosophy
Distributed data collection infrastructure for IT and OT networks for automated early warning detection
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Guangdong Bai, Dr Naipeng Dong
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Doctor Philosophy
Applying Situational Crime Prevention to Business Processes to Prevent Cybercrime
Principal Advisor
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Doctor Philosophy
Adaptive, secure and resilient programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and data transfer protocols
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Tapan Saha, Associate Professor Guangdong Bai
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Doctor Philosophy
Virtualized Root of Trust in Cloud Computing
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Naipeng Dong
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Doctor Philosophy
Efficient Methods for Automating Reconstruction of Provenance and Cryptocurrency Networks for Crime Attribution
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Miao Xu
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Doctor Philosophy
Informal and formal justice for rape: Digital "court" and court trials in Australia
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Allison Fish, Dr Jonah Rimer
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Doctor Philosophy
Examining Changes in Conspiracy Discourse on Reddit from 2019 - 2023
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Martin Schweinberger
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Doctor Philosophy
Unified Cyber Security Framework for Distributed Learning
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Guangdong Bai
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Doctor Philosophy
IoT security analytics
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Naipeng Dong, Associate Professor Guangdong Bai
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Doctor Philosophy
Security of Internet of Things (IoT) Integration
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Guangdong Bai
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Doctor Philosophy
The nexus between data breaches, cyber safety and employee productivity in the hybrid work context
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Remi Ayoko
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Doctor Philosophy
Advancing cyberworthiness via integration of AI and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Priyanka Singh
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Doctor Philosophy
A corpus-based analysis of conspiracy theory discourse on Reddit: Understanding conspiracy-fuelled anomie and moral panics during COVID-19
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Martin Schweinberger
Completed supervision
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2024
Doctor Philosophy
Using Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) to Prevent Cybercrimes
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Lorraine Mazerolle
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2023
Doctor Philosophy
Security and Performance Evaluation of Software Defined Networking adopting Moving Target Defenses
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Dan Kim
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2023
Doctor Philosophy
Investigating the components of a contextual cyber resilience for organisations
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Sergeja Slapnicar
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2021
Doctor Philosophy
Privacy-preserving Sharing for Genome-wide Analysis
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Caitlin Curtis, Associate Professor Guangdong Bai, Professor Xue Li
Media
Enquiries
Contact Professor Ryan Ko directly for media enquiries about:
- AI for Cyber Security
- Cloud Computing Security
- Critical infrastructure security
- Cyber Attack Attribution
- Cyber Crime
- Cyber Security
- Cybersecurity
- Data Accountability
- Data Control
- Data Privacy
- Data Provenance
- Data Tracking
- ICS Security
- Industrial control systems security
- Information Security
- Privacy enhancing technologies
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