Two senior Computer Science students at LUMS, Izza Shahid and Shahzaib Ali, completed research internships this summer at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany, exploring emerging challenges in digital privacy and security.
Under the supervision of Dr. Jane Im, Izza Shahid conducted a qualitative study examining how social media users in the United States understand the business models behind the platforms they use and whether they would consider safer, more privacy-conscious alternatives. Her research seeks to inform safer platform design and improve users’ understanding of how social media services operate.

Working under the supervision of Dr. Ana-Maria Cretu, Shahzaib Ali focused on membership inference attacks, which assesses whether specific data was used to train a machine learning model. He developed a modular framework that enables researchers to customize and evaluate these attacks, benchmarked existing approaches from the research literature, and worked towards a novel attack to assess privacy risks in large-scale datasets.

Their internships provided opportunities to contribute to international research addressing the privacy implications of social media platforms and emerging AI technologies