Gabriela KurtevaDC2
Bio
Gabriela Kurteva is a PhD student within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network 'HARNESS - Harnessing AI and Data-Intensive Technologies' enrolled at Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Prof. Lewis, Dr. Pandit and co-supervisor Prof. Edoardo Celeste. She received her Master's degree in Advanced Computer Science and Bachelor's in Computer Science at Cardiff University, focusing her research on data privacy, protection and legal compliance from both human-centred and technical perspectives. Her work shades light on unlawful access practices to personal data through the manipulative techniques 'Dark Patterns', occuring during user consent through Consent Management Platforms (CMPs). By exploring what implications web cookies impose on the end-user through UI components such as cookie banners as per GDPR, her research further explored the role of cookies in privacy intrusions, informed consent violations and security vulnerabilities (e.g. XSS, CSRF), particularly in contexts where sensitive data sharing occurs between third parties.
Her development as a scientific researcher will begin by exploring the Semantic Web in the context of data and AI regulation in terms of actors, rights and obligations aiming to create semantic frameworks for representing complex regulatory contexts. Throughout her PhD, her collaboration with both academic and industry partners will promote the standardisation and adoption of developed taxonomies across areas of innovation including government systems (e.g Solid Pods) and AI language models.