19 students successfully completed their Graduation Research Projects on Network systems and network security track in the scope of the 41th Twente Student Conference on IT (TScIT), which took place on July 5th 2024. Our students, supervised by DACS or SCS faculty, explored a diverse range of research questions from the use/benefit of leveraging large language models for cybersecurity processes to privacy-preserving crowd analysis for transportation planning.
One of the best paper recipients was Adamo Mariani with his paper entitled Beyond COPPA: Analysing Data Safety Across All Age Groups in Mobile Apps which delves into the relationship between data collection practices and privacy policy consistencies of mobile applications. Motivated by the importance of protecting data privacy of the users, e.g., minors, teenagers, the paper develops a classifier to determine an app's targeted age group based on information from its app listing, compares apps from Google Play to those from the App Store to explore the differences in permission requests done by apps targeting various age groups across platforms, and compares an app's disclosed data safety information in their app listing with their privacy policy. Congratulations to Adamo for his excellent research under the supervision of Antonia Affinito and Matteo Liberato!
In addition to the conference’s best paper awards, each track selects the best presenter among its speakers. This year’s edition witnessed a tough competition among the presenters; based on the audience votes, three presenters were selected as the best presenters of the track. Congratulations to Teun Hoven, Beau Jonkhout, and Klelia Prodromou for their engaging talks!
Sustainability of digital systems: Another highlight of this edition is the completed projects on sustainable communication systems. Two studies explored the sustainability of digital technologies; one by Yolina Yordanova modelling the web browsing energy intensity over time and combining it with regional grid carbon intensity data and user traffic to estimate the emissions from different websites and another by Yasin Omidi providing a comparative analysis of how different types of daily internet traffic contribute to the digital emissions of end users according to the Sustainable Web Design (SWD) model. An earlier study by Max Jeltes from the previous edition of Twente Student Conference provided also interesting insights on the greenness of the hosting providers in the Netherlands and for the Dutch ministries in his paper Analyzing the use of renewable energy in Dutch web hosting through DNS measurement data. This paper, which was cherished with a best-paper award of the conference, studies if websites, hosted in the Netherlands, run on sustainable Energy sources. Using DNS data collected at DACS the paper maps popular domain names to hosting providers. Then, the author combines this information with data about the energy sources of data centers, provided by the Green Web Foundation. The paper shows that only 29% of the studied domain names are hosted running green energy. Also, the author finds that only half of the websites by the Dutch government rely on sustainable energy sources. The study demonstrates that there is still lots of room for improvement when it comes to sustainably powering the Dutch web. Please see the paper for more details.
