Shukun Tokas successfully completed her PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the University of Oslo on Friday, the 19th of February 2021 and will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

The title of her thesis is “Analysis and Enforcement of GDPR-related Privacy Principles in Object-Oriented Distributed Systems” and the given topic for her trial lecture was “Temporal logics: Theory, tools and applications”.

Main research findings

Privacy is recognized as a fundamental human right in the European Union, giving the right to a private life and associated freedom. In the midst of digital disruption, to have a meaningful balance between the fundamental privacy rights, innovation, and economic growth, it is therefore important to consider privacy as a primary requirement in system engineering. This thesis provides fundamental computing concepts for privacy, in order to facilitate construction of privacy-compliant systems.

By making privacy as an intrinsic component in design and development of systems, contributions of this thesis provide a way to turn privacy needs into tangible controls and a way to verify if the system is privacy compliant. In particular, the thesis focus on GDPR’s specific privacy requirements: data protection by design and data subject access request. There is a growing demand for verifiable privacy compliance in order to produce evidence for regulatory requirements such as accountability, transparency, etc. And this research work is at the intersection of GDPR-related privacy requirements and formal methods to facilitate a formal specification and verification of privacy compliance.

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate her thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Professor Issa Traore, University of Victoria, Canada.
• Second external opponent: Professor Erika Ábrahám, RWTH Aachen University, Germany.
• Internal member: Researcher Silvia Lizeth Tapia Tarifa, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.
• Chair of defence: Professor Carsten Griwodz, Department of Informatics, UiO

Shukun Tokas carried out her PhD work at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.

Her main supervisor was Professor Olaf Owe, Department of Informatics, UiO and co-supervisors Professor Martin Steffen, Department of Informatics, UiO and Postdoctoral Fellow Toktam Ramezanifarkhani, Department of Informatics, UiO.

Congratulations!