Dr. Zubair Ahmad

Academic and Professional Background

Dr. Zubair Ahmad completed his Ph.D. in computer science (cyber security) under the supervision of Prof. Stefano Calzavara at the University of Venice, Italy in 2024. His research mainly focuses on security and privacy-related issues on the web, information flow analysis, web measurements, EU compliance regulations, GDPR, and the Internet of Things. He also attended the Oregon Programming Languages Summer School (OPLSS) jointly organized by Boston University and the University of Oregon USA. In 2023, Dr. Zubair also worked as a visiting scholar with Secure Web Application Group (SWAG) under the supervision of Prof. Ben Stock at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security Germany.  He was also the part of European Parliament VeUMEU 2022 to work on the EU AI Act.

Before that, Dr. Zubair obtained his master’s degree in Information and Communication Engineering from CQUPT Chongqing China in 2019 where he got the Outstanding Graduate award. During his master’s degree, He worked under the supervision of Prof. Rong Chai on the Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine Communication. In Dec 2017, Dr. Zubair along with his team won the first cash prize for his business idea “PET WORLD” at the One Belt One Road Business Idea Challenge China. He was also the vice-president of the International Student Association CQUPT China. Along with that, He also received many other awards including the Best Performance award in the United States Academic Decathlon and the best research paper award in WOCC 2019. From 2013 to 2014, he worked at IPL I2c.Inc. as a field engineer. He also worked as a trainee engineer at Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) from 2014 to 2015.

If you want to know more about him, please visit his personal webpage

Selected Publications

1. Ahmad, Z., Calzavara, S., Casarin, S., & Stock, B. (2024). Information flow control for comparative privacy analyses. International Journal of Information Security, 23(5), 3199-3216.
2. Ahmad, Z., Casarin, S. and Calzavara, S., 2023. An Empirical Analysis of Web Storage and Its Applications to Web Tracking. ACM Transactions on the Web, 18(1), pp.1-28.
3. Ahmad, Z., Casarin, S. and Calzavara, S., 2022. What Storage? An Empirical Analysis of Web Storage in the Wild. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web (MADWeb) 2022.
4. Liu, C., Ahmad, Z., Chai, R. and Chen, Q., 2020. Energy efficiency optimization-based joint resource allocation and clustering algorithm for M2M communication networks (workshop). In Communications and Networking: 14th EAI International Conference, ChinaCom 2019, Shanghai, China, November 29–December 1, 2019, Proceedings, Part II 14(pp. 351-363).
5. Ahmad, Z., Ma, P., Wei, T., Wang, L. and Chai, R., 2020. Service Delay Minimization-Based Joint Clustering and Content Placement Algorithm for Cellular D2D Communication Systems. In Communications and Networking: 14th EAI International Conference, ChinaCom 2019, Shanghai, China, November 29–December 1, 2019, Proceedings, Part II 14(pp. 180-191).
6. Almughalles, W., Chai, R., Lin, J. and Ahmad, Z., 2019, May. Task execution latency minimization-based joint computation offloading and cell selection for MEC-enabled HetNets. In 2019 28th Wireless and Optical Communications Conference (WOCC)(pp. 1-5).

Awards, Honors, and Fellowships

• May 2021-22, Best Performance Award – European Parliament – Venice Universities Model European Union
• Sep  2021, Ph.D. Representative – University of Venice
• Jun 2021, Summer School OPLSS – University of Oregon and Boston University USA
• Nov 2020, Italian Ph.D. Fellowship
• Jun 2019, Outstanding Graduate Award – Master’s Degree 2019
• Jun 2019, Best Performance Award – United States Academic Decathlon
• Jun 2019, Best Paper Award, WOCC China 2019
• Dec 2017, First Prize “One Belt One Road Business Idea Challenge CQUPT, China
• Mar 2018, Vice President – International Students Association CQUPT China
• Jul. 2016, Chinese Scholarship Award

MS Theses Supervised:

1. Hamza Rouhani (Co-supervised with Stefano Calzavara), Automated Detection of Tracking Behavior for Web Storage, MS Thesis, Uni of Venice 2022.
2. Samuele Casarin (Co-supervised with Stefano Calzavara and Pietro Ferrara), Understanding the Use of Web Storage in Real-World Web Applications, MS Thesis, Uni of Venice 2021.

Invited Talks:

1. We Value Your Privacy – The Biggest Lie on the Internet, University of Venice Italy 2021
2. Security Vulnerabilities in Graph Neural Networks, University of Venice Italy 2021
3. Privacy Analysis of Web Storage, University of Venice Italy 2022
4. What storage? An Empirical Analysis of Web Storage in the Wild, MADWeb NDSS USA 2022
5. EU AI Act, European Parliament – Venice Universities Model European Union 2023

Program Committee:

1. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium 2025 (PETs)
2. Workshop on Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web (MADWeb,  USA) 2024