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Transactive microgrids are emerging as a transformative solution for the problems faced by distribution system operators due to an increase in the use of distributed energy resources and a rapid acceleration in renewable energy generation,…
The rising diffusion of information systems (IS) throughout society poses an increasingly serious threat to privacy as a social value. One approach to alleviating this threat is to establish transparency of information privacy practices…
In decentralized personal data ecosystems grounded in architectures such as Solid, users retain sovereignty over their data via personal online data stores (pods), hosted on Solid-compliant server infrastructures. In such environments, data…
This thesis proposes techniques aiming to make blockchain technologies and smart contract platforms practical by improving their scalability, latency, and privacy. This thesis starts by presenting the design and implementation of…
Opening up data produced by the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices for public utilization can maximize their economic value. Challenges remain in the trustworthiness of the data sources and the security of the trading process,…
The web of today whether you prefer to call it web 2.0, web 3.0, web 5.0 or even the metaverse is at a critical stage of evolution and challenge, largely centered around its crisis of identity. Like teenagers who cannot assess properly…
Lending protocols are one of the main applications of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), enabling crypto-assets loan markets with a total value estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Unlike traditional lending systems, these protocols…
Dealing with a growing amount of data is a crucial challenge for the future of information and communication technologies. More and more devices are expected to transfer data through the Internet, therefore new solutions have to be designed…
A trusted electronic election system requires that all the involved information must go public, that is, it focuses not only on transparency but also privacy issues. In other words, each ballot should be counted anonymously, correctly, and…
An increasing amount of users' sensitive information is now being collected for analytics purposes. To protect users' privacy, differential privacy has been widely studied in the literature. Specifically, a differentially private algorithm…
Limited transparency in targeted advertising on online content delivery platforms can breed mistrust for both viewers (of the content and ads) and advertisers. This user study (n=864) explores how explanations for targeted ads can bridge…
Recently, privacy issues in web services that rely on users' personal data have raised great attention. Unlike existing privacy-preserving technologies such as federated learning and differential privacy, we explore another way to mitigate…
The use of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for multimedia distribution has spread out globally in recent years. The mass popularity is primarily driven by cost-effective distribution of content, also giving rise to piracy. An end user…
Decentralized communication is becoming an important use case within Web3. On Ethereum, users can repurpose the transaction input data field to embed natural-language messages, commonly known as Input Data Messages (IDMs). However, as IDMs…
Transaction fee mechanism design is a new decentralized mechanism design problem where users bid for space on the blockchain. Several recent works showed that the transaction fee mechanism design fundamentally departs from classical…
Cryptocurrencies are poised to revolutionize the modern economy by democratizing commerce. These currencies operate on top of blockchain-based distributed ledgers. Existing permissionless blockchain-based protocols offer unparalleled…
Online advertising platforms are thriving due to the customizable audiences they offer advertisers. However, recent studies show that advertisements can be discriminatory with respect to the gender or race of the audience that sees the ad,…
In the era of Web3, decentralized technologies have emerged as the cornerstone of a new digital paradigm. Backed by a decentralized blockchain architecture, the Web3 space aims to democratize all aspects of the web. From data-sharing to…
Third-party cookies have been a privacy concern since cookies were first developed in the mid 1990s, but more strict cookie policies were only introduced by Internet browser vendors in the early 2010s. More recently, due to regulatory…
Transactive energy systems (TES) are emerging as a transformative solution for the problems faced by distribution system operators due to an increase in the use of distributed energy resources and a rapid acceleration in renewable energy…