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Dr Zahra Pooranian

Picture of Dr Zahra Pooranian

Office

 Room 134

Building location

Polly Vacher

Areas of interest

  • Security and Data Privacy
  • Adversarial Machine Learning
  • Cloud/Fog Computing
  • Smart Grid Systems
  • Applied AI/ML and Optimization

Teaching

  • Big Data & Cloud Computing
  • Object-Oriented Programming

Research centres and groups

 

Background

Zahra has been a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Reading since August 2023. Zahra Pooranian was a postdoctoral fellow in Network Security at the 5GIC & 6GIC, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK since 2020 to July 2023. Zahra has participated in/contributed to two projects: PASSCOINFOG (funded by Huawei-finalized) and AUTOTRUST (Funded by European Space Agency-ongoing). Before, she was a postdoctoral at The Alan Turing Institute and worked on National Privacy Project in London, UK. She was working on Enhancing Security and Privacy of National Identity Systems project. From 2017 to 2019, she was postdoctoral in network security under the supervision of Prof. Mauro Conti at the University of Padua, Padua, Italy. She was part of the Security and Privacy Through Zeal (SPRITZ) research group and worked on a European H2020 project, TagItSmart! - Smart Tags-driven service platform for enabling ecosystems of connected objects. Her main activities include but are not limited to cloud/fog storage security and privacy and applying AI/ML techniques for malware detection. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy, in February 2017. She was honored to be supervised by Prof. Enrico Tronci on Automating Design of Smart Grid Systems. Besides, she was involved in the FP7 project SmartHG (Energy Demand Aware Open Services for Smart Grid Intelligent Automation).

Academic qualifications

  • University of Sapienza, Rome, Italy, PhD, Computer Science, 2014-2017

Awards and honours

AWARDS:

  • ERCIM Research Fellow at, CNR, Pisa, Italy, (September 2023-August 2024)

  • Visiting Research Associate Fellowship, University of Ryerson, Toronto, ON, Canada, (May 2019-October 2019)

  • Research Associate Fellowship, European H2020 Support, University of Padua, Padua, Italy, (May 2017-May 2019)
  • Review Certificate Award in Journal of Network and Computer Applications (JNCA), (27 October 2016)

INVITED TALKS:

  • [December 2020] Invited Speaker, ICTALK-2020 virtual event organized by the National University of Chimborazo (Ecuador), speaking about “Side-Channel Attack in Cloud Storage.” Video!

CONFERENCE AND WORKSHOP PARTICIPATION:

  • IEEE INFOCOM workshop- Honolulu, USA, April 2018
  • IEEE SOFTCOM conference- Split, September 2016
  • IEEE ICFIT conference- Singapore, September 2011

HONORS AND CERTIFICATES:

  • Certificate LITEC-IRAN L.P.I, Sharif University, CCNA, March 2013
  • Certificate LITEC-IRAN L.P.I, Sharif University, CCNP, May 2013
  • Certificate LITEC-IRAN L.P.I, Sharif University, Web Design, June 2013

VISITING PERIODS:

Professional bodies/affiliations

  • IEEE, Senior Member

Websites/blogs

https://zahrapooranian.github.io/Zahra/

Selected publications

1.Z. Pooranian, M. Shojafar, R. Taheri, R. Tafazolli. PASCOINFOG/PASFOG: Privacy-preserving Data Deduplication Algorithms for Fog Storage Systems, IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, 2023.

2. Z. Pooranian, M. Shojafar, P. Asef, M. Robinson, H. Lees, M. Longden. RCA-IDS: A Novel Real-time Cloud-based Adversarial IDS for Connected Vehicles, The 22nd IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom-2023), Exeter, UK, 1-3 November 2023.

3. R. Baby, Z. Pooranian, M. Shojafar, R. Tafazolli. A Heterogenous IoT Attack Detection through Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Dynamic ML Approach, The 58th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, (IEEE ICC'23), Rome, Italy, 28 May - 01 June 2023.

4. M. Robinson, P. Asef, M. Shojafar, et al. "AutoDetect: A Novel Real-Time Intelligent Sensor Failure Detection for Connected Vehicles", The IEEE IAS Global Conference on Emerging Technologies (IEEE GlobConET), London, UK, 19-21 May 2023.

5. M. Golmaryami, R. Taheri, Z. Pooranian, M. Shojafar, P. Xiao. SETTI: A Self-Supervised AdvErsarial Malware DeTection ArchiTecture in an IoT Environment, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM), pp. 1-20, May 2022.

6. P. Haji Mirzaee, M. Shojafar, Z. Pooranian, P. Asef, H. Cruickshank, R. Tafazolli. FIDS: A Federated Intrusion Detection System for 5G Smart Metering Network, The 17th IEEE International Conference on Mobility, Sensing and Networking, (IEEE MSN 2021), Exeter, UK, 13-15 December 2021.

7. S. Soltani, M. Shojafar, H. Mostafaei, Z. Pooranian, R. Tafazolli. Link Latency Attack in Software-Defined Networks, The 17th IEEE International Conference on Network and Service Management (IEEE CNSM 2021), pp.1-7, 25-29 October 2021.

8. Z. Pooranian, M. Conti, H. Haddadi, R. Tafazolli. Online Advertising Security: Issues, Taxonomy, and Future Directions, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (COMST), pp. 1-31, October 2021.

9. M. Golec, R. Ozturac, Z. Pooranian, S. Singh Gill, R. Buyya. iFaaSBus: A Security and Privacy based Lightweight Framework for Serverless Computing using IoT and Machine Learning, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII), pp. 1-8, July 2021.

10.Z. Pooranian, M. Shojafar, S. Garg, R. Taheri, R. Tafazolli. LEVER: Secure Deduplicated Cloud Storage with Encrypted Two-Party Interactions in Cyber-Physical Systems, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII), pp. 1-10, August 2020.

11. R. Taheri, R. Javidan, M. Shojafar, Z. Pooranian, A. Miri, M. Conti. On Defending Against Label Flipping Attacks on Malware Detection Systems, Springer, Neural Computing and Applications (NCAA), pp. 1-23, March 2020. 

12. R. Taheri, R. Javidan, Z. Pooranian. Adversarial Android Malware Detection for Mobile Multimedia Applications in IoT Environments, Springer, Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP), pp. 1-12, February 2020.

13. R. Taheri, M. Ghahremani, R. Javidan, M. Shojafar, Z. Pooranian, M. Conti. Similarity-based Android Malware Detection Using Hamming Distance of Static Binary Features, Elsevier, Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS), Vol. 105, pp. 230-247, April 2020.

14. P.G. Vineuza, Z. Pooranian, M. Shojafar, M. Conti, R. Buyya. FOCAN: A Fog-supported Smart City Network Architecture for Management of Applications in the Internet of Everything Environments, Elsevier, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC), Vol. 132, pp. 274-283, October 2019.

15. M. Shojafar, Z. Pooranian, M. Sookhak, R. Buyya. Recent advances in cloud data centers toward fog data centers, Wiley, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (CPE), pp. 1-4, April 2019.

16. M. Shojafar, R. Taheri, Z. Pooranian, R. Javidan, A. Miri, Y. Jararweh. Automatic Clustering of Attacks in Intrusion Detection Systems, The 16th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA 2019), Abu Dhabi, UAE, pp.1-8, 3-7 November 2019.

17. H. Mehdi, Z. Pooranian, P.G. Vineuza. Cloud traffic prediction based on fuzzy ARIMA model with low dependence on historical data, Wiley, Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, pp. 3731, September 2019.

18. Z. Pooranian, J. H. Abawajy, Vinod P., M. Conti. Scheduling Distributed Energy Resource Operation and Daily Power Consumption for a Smart Building to Optimize Economic and Environmental Parameters, In (MDPI) Energies, Vol. 11, May 2018.

19. Z. Pooranian, K-Ch. Chen, Ch-Mu. Yu, M. Conti. RARE: Defeating Side Channels based on Data-Deduplication in Cloud Storage, The 7th International workshop on Cloud Computing Systems, Networks, and Applications (IEEE INFOCOM 2018 workshop: CCSNA 2018), Honolulu, USA, pp.444-449, 16-19 April 2018.

20. P.G. Vineuza, Z. Pooranian, Sh. Shamshirband, J. H. Abawajy, M. Conti. Fog over Virtualized IoT: New Opportunity for Context-Aware Networked Applications and a Case Study, In (MDPI) Applied Sciences, Vol. 7, December 2017.

21. Z. Pooranian, M. Shojafar, P.G. Vineuza, L. Chiaraviglio, M. Conti. A Novel Distributed Fog-based Networked Architecture to Preserve Energy in Fog Data Centers, The 14th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems (IEEE MASS 2017), Orlando, FL, USA, pp. 605-609, 22-25 October 2017.

22. M. Shojafar, Z. Pooranian, P.G. Vineuza, E. Baccarelli. FLAPS: bandwidth and delay-efficient distributed data searching in Fog-supported P2P content delivery networks, Springer, Journal of Supercomputing (SUPE), pp. 1-22, June 2017.

23. P.G. Vineuza, M. Shojafar, H. Mostafaei, Z. Pooranian, E. Baccarelli. P_SEP: A Prolong Stable Election Routing Algorithm for Energy-limited Heterogeneous Fog-supported Wireless Sensor Networks, Springer, Journal of Supercomputing (SUPE), Vol. 73, No. 2, pp. 733-755, February 2017.

24. Z. Pooranian, N Nikmehr, S Najafi-Ravadanegh, H Mahdin, J Abawajy. Economical and Environmental Operation of Smart Networked Microgrids Under Uncertainties Using NSGA-II, The 24th International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (IEEE SOFTCOM), Split, Croatia, pp. 1-6, 22-24 September 2016.

25. Z. Pooranian, M. Shojafar, J. H. Abawajy, A. Abraham. An Efficient Meta-heuristic Algorithm for Grid Computing, Springer, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization (JOCO), Vol. 30, pp. 413-434, October 2015. 

Publications

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