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Computer Science

Dr Amna Shifa

PhD, MSc, BEd, BSc

Contact Details

Marie Curie Fellow
School of Computer Science
University of Galway
E: Amna.Shifa@universityofgalway.ie

Biography

Dr. Amna Shifa is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Computer Science, University of Galway, Ireland. This prestigious award is supported by the MSCA grant agreement No. 101109961 (Project: SISSViD) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme funded by the European Union.

She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Islamia University of Bahawalpur (IUB), Pakistan under the government-funded project 6282/Punjab/NRPU/R&D/HEC/2016. The primary focus of her doctoral research titled "Effective Security Framework for Confidentiality Protection of Smart Surveillance Systems" was to address the limitations of security measures and the restricted capabilities of surveillance systems by designing a security framework that protects the confidentiality of videos. This interdisciplinary work encompasses computer vision, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), and cryptography.

She served as a regular faculty member in the Department of Information Security (DIS), Faculty of Computing, at The Islamia University of Bahawalpur (IUB), Pakistan, where she is currently on postdoctoral leave. With over 10 years of lecturing and R&D experience, she brings extensive knowledge and expertise to her academic role. In her position, she supervised one Ph.D (in progress), six MS/M.Phil. students (completed), and four research associates recruited under Research Grant 20-15611/NRPU/R&D/HEC/2021. Apart from lecturing and research, she was actively involved in organising capacity-building workshops, talks, webinars, and seminars featuring international speakers within the department.

She has published several articles in ISI-indexed journals and international conference proceedings. She is also actively involved in reviewing research articles for renowned journals and conferences, including those published by IEEE, Springer, and Elsevier. She serves on the program committees of leading international conferences and is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Research Interests

Cybersecurity: Data Privacy, Cryptology, Threat Modeling, Social Engineering, Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), Blockchain, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Computer Vision: Visual Data Processing/Analysis, Object and Event Detection, Video Quality Analytics, Information Retrieval (Visual Data), Fuzzy Systems, Ontology.

Others: Deep Learning, Video Encoder Systems, Edge Analytics, Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) (Smart systems), and Quantum Computing (Post-Quantum Cryptography)

Research Projects

	Project	Start Date	End Date
	SISSVid: Secure and Intelligent Storage System for Large-scale Visual Data Analytics	25-OCT-23	24-OCT-25

Peer Reviewed Journals

	Year	Publication
	(2024)	'Survey on Video Security: Examining Threats, Challenges, and Future Trends' Ali Asghar, Amna Shifa, Mamoona Naveed Asghar (2024) 'Survey on Video Security: Examining Threats, Challenges, and Future Trends'. Computers, Materials \& Continua, 80 (3):3591-3635 [DOI] [Details]
	(2022)	'VQProtect: Lightweight Visual Quality Protection for Error-Prone Selectively Encrypted Video Streaming' Gillani, Syeda Maria and Asghar, Mamoona Naveed and Shifa, Amna and Abdullah, Saima and Kanwal, Nadia and Fleury, Martin (2022) 'VQProtect: Lightweight Visual Quality Protection for Error-Prone Selectively Encrypted Video Streaming'. Entropy, 24 (6) [Details]
	(2020)	'MuLViS: Multi-Level Encryption Based Security System for Surveillance Videos' Shifa, Amna and Asghar, Mamoona N. and Fleury, Martin and Kanwal, Nadia and Ansari, Mohammad S. and Lee, Brian and Herbst, Marco and Qiao, Yuansong (2020) 'MuLViS: Multi-Level Encryption Based Security System for Surveillance Videos'. IEEE Access, 8 :177131-177155 [DOI] [Details]
	(2020)	'Fuzzy-logic threat classification for multi-level selective encryption over real-time video streams' Shifa, Amna,Naveed Asghar, Mamoona,Ahmed, Adeel,Fleury, Martin (2020) 'Fuzzy-logic threat classification for multi-level selective encryption over real-time video streams'. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 11 (11):5369-5397 [Details]
	(2020)	'Skin detection and lightweight encryption for privacy protection in real-time surveillance applications' Amna Shifa and Muhammad Babar Imtiaz and Mamoona Naveed Asghar and Martin Fleury (2020) 'Skin detection and lightweight encryption for privacy protection in real-time surveillance applications'. Image and Vision Computing, 94 [DOI] [Details]
	(2019)	'Lightweight Cipher for H.264 Videos in the Internet of Multimedia Things with Encryption Space Ratio Diagnostics' Shifa, Amna and Asghar, Mamoona Naveed and Noor, Salma and Gohar, Neelam and Fleury, Martin (2019) 'Lightweight Cipher for H.264 Videos in the Internet of Multimedia Things with Encryption Space Ratio Diagnostics'. Sensors, 19 (5) [Details]
	(2019)	'Efficient Lightweight Encryption Algorithm for Smart Video Applications' Amna Shifa and Mamoona Naveed Asghar and Naila Batool and Martin Fleury (2019) 'Efficient Lightweight Encryption Algorithm for Smart Video Applications'. CoRR, abs/1901.08344 [Details]
	(2018)	'Joint Crypto-Stego Scheme for Enhanced Image Protection With Nearest-Centroid Clustering' Shifa, Amna and Afgan, Muhammad S. and Asghar, Mamoona N. and Fleury, Martin and Memon, Imran and Abdullah, Saima and Rasheed, Nadia (2018) 'Joint Crypto-Stego Scheme for Enhanced Image Protection With Nearest-Centroid Clustering'. IEEE Access, 6 :16189-16206 [DOI] [Details]

Conference Publications

	Year	Publication
	(2024)	*Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security* Shifa, Amna and Kennedy, R\'on\'an and Asghar, Mamoona Naveed (2024) GDPR-compliant Video Search and Retrieval System for Surveillance Data Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security New York, NY, USA, [Details]
	(2019)	*Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2018* Shifa, Amna and Asghar, Mamoona Naveed and Fleury, Martin and Afgan, Muhammad Sher (2019) Ontology-Based Intelligent Security Framework for Smart Video Surveillance . In: Arai, Kohei and Bhatia, Rahul and Kapoor, Supriya eds. Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2018 Cham, , pp.118-126 [Details]
	(2016)	*2016 Sixth International Conference on Innovative Computing Technology (INTECH)* Shifa, Amna and Asghar, Mamoona N. and Fleury, Martin (2016) Multimedia security perspectives in IoT 2016 Sixth International Conference on Innovative Computing Technology (INTECH) , pp.550-555 [Details]

Honours and Awards

Year	Title	Awarding Body
2023	MSCA Postdoc Fellowship	European Commission
2021	Competitive Research Grant (20-15611/NRPU/R&D/HEC/2021)	Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan
2018	Travel Grant	Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan
2016	Research Grant 6282/Punjab /NRPU/R&D/HEC/2016 (Govt. of Pakistan)	Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan
2010	Merit Scholarship	Bahria University Islamabad

Employment

Employer	Position	From / To
University of Galway	MSCA Postdoc Research Fellow	25-OCT-23 /
The Islamia University of Bahawalpur	Assistant Professor	10-DEC-20 / 23-OCT-23
The Islamia University of Bahawalpur	Lecturer	01-JUN-20 / 10-DEC-20
National College of Business Administration & Economics (NCBA&E)	Assistant Professor	01-MAR-16 / 31-MAY-20

Education

Year	Institution	Qualification	Subject
2019	The Islamia University of Bahawalpur	PhD	Computer Science
2015	The Islamia University of Bahawalpur	B.Ed	Education Training
2012	Bahria University Islamabad, Pakistan	MS (SE)	Software Engineering