PhD Position on Privacy-Preserving Data Visiting for Interoperable Healthcare Systems

This PhD project aims to develop a reference architecture for data visiting. This paradigm enables algorithms to securely access and process data within the environments where it resides, supporting federated learning for training machine learning models without moving sensitive or large-scale datasets across systems. The project will focus on designing a modular framework that addresses security, privacy, governance, and performance, while providing mechanisms to manage interoperability and semantic challenges when working with heterogeneous healthcare datasets. To ensure practical applicability, the architecture will be evaluated using healthcare data, a domain characterized by strict privacy regulations, diverse data standards, and complex interoperability requirements.

Case studies will be conducted within the ERDERA EU project, which explores secure and privacy-preserving approaches to sharing rare disease data across European research infrastructures. By combining architectural modeling with practical prototyping, this research seeks to establish a blueprint for trustworthy, semantically-aware data visiting infrastructures that can support advanced analytics and AI in healthcare.

The SCS department at UT's Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science (EEMCS) advances semantic modelling, cybersecurity, and service design to enable meaningful computing within trusted digital environments. Their research focuses on ontology-driven conceptual modelling, FAIR data stewardship, and model-driven system/service engineering, dealing with data-driven services that understand the context and respond to changing situations.

SCS develops ontologies and service composition frameworks to achieve semantic interoperability and meaningful enterprise services. To safeguard these services, they create automated methodologies for system analysis, threat detection, and mitigation alongside privacy-enhancing technologies and data protection techniques.

Collaborating with industry, academia, and government, the SCS group applies its research across sectors like healthcare, agriculture, logistics, emergency management, smart cities, and manufacturing, addressing complex societal challenges through an interdisciplinary approach.