Profile

Dr Joss Wright is a Senior Research Fellow, Co-Director of the Oxford EPSRC Cybersecurity Doctoral Training Centre, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, and an Alan Turing Fellow. His work focuses on computational approaches to social science questions, with a particular focus on technologies that exert, resist, or subvert control over information.

Joss’ main areas of research are information controls, with a focus on internet censorship and shutdowns; privacy enhancing technologies and data anonymisation; and cybercrime, with a particular focus on the online illegal wildlife trade and its implications for biodiversity and conservation.

Joss gained his PhD in Computer Science at the University of York, where his work focused on the modelling and analysis of anonymous communication systems. Following this, he spent time at the University of Siegen in Germany, researching security and privacy issues in cloud computing. He joined the OII as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2010.

Research Interests

Information controls, internet censorship, illegal wildlife trade, conservation, privacy enhancing technologies, machine learning, bayesian statistical inference, computational social science.

Positions held at the OII

  • Senior Research Fellow, November 2017 –
  • Research Fellow, November 2012 – November 2017
  • Fresnel Research Fellow, January 2010 – November 2012

Students supervised at the OII

Current students

  • Samantha Bradshaw
  • Margaret Cheesman
  • John Gallacher
  • Bendert Zevenbergen

Research

Past projects

  • Discriminatory Effects of Automated Decision Making in Information Controls

    Participants: Dr Joss Wright

    This project seeks to determine how the factors that drive internet filtering can negatively affect vulnerable groups in society.

  • Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade

    Participants: Dr Joss Wright

    This project will develop an international hub to track and analyse the global illegal wildlife trade, both online and offline, and develop strategies to reduce the threat of the trade through social policy interventions.

  • Economic Geographies of the Darknet

    Participants: Professor Mark Graham, Dr Joss Wright, Martin Dittus

    This project investigates the economic geographies of illegal economic activities in anonymous internet marketplaces.

  • Digital Personhood: Being There: Humans and Robots in Public Spaces (HARPS)

    Participants: Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright, Guy Piers O'Hanlon

    This project considers the challenges of having robot proxies in public spaces. It will conduct experiments exploring trust in shared social settings, and develop a framework for understanding the impact of privacy / anonymity in human-robot interactions.

  • Future Home Networks and Services

    Participants: Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright, Guy Piers O'Hanlon, Dr Andrew Martin

    This project is addressing home network and service security by researching and developing security frameworks for sharing between networks and devices, protocols to connect devices with cloud services, and security analysis of remote management systems.

  • FRESNEL: Federated Secure Sensor Network Laboratory

    Participants: Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright, Guy Piers O'Hanlon

    FRESNEL aims to build a large scale federated sensor network framework with multiple applications sharing the same resources, where reliable intra-application communication is guaranteed, as well as a scalable and distributed management infrastructure.

  • IMSK: Integrated Mobile Security Kit

    Participants: Dr Anne-Marie Oostveen, Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright

    IMSK integrates information from legacy and novel sensor technologies into common operational picture where information is fused into intelligence, in a mobile system suitable for rapid deployment at venues which temporarily need enhanced security.

  • SUBITO: Surveillance of Unattended Baggage and the Identification and Tracking of the Owner

    Participants: Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright

    SUBITO is designed to research and further develop automated real time detection of abandoned luggage, fast identification of the individual responsible and his/her subsequent path and current location.

Chapters

Conference papers

Journal articles

Reports

  • Nash, V.J., Adler, J.R., Horvath, M.A.H., Livingstone, S., Marston, C., Owen, G. and Wright, J. (2016) "Identifying the Routes by which Children View Pornography Online: Implications for Future Policy-makers Seeking to Limit Viewing" In: Report of the Expert Panel for the DCMS Consultation "Child Safety Online: Age Verification for Pornography".
  • Zevenbergen, B., Brown, I., Wright, J. and Erdos, D. (2013) Ethical privacy guidelines for mobile connectivity measurements. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.
  • Sieber, U., Tropina, T., von zur Mühlen, N., Brown, I., Wright, J., Broadhurst, R. and Krüger, K. (2013) "Comprehensive Study on Cybercrime" In: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Vienna.
  • Wright, J.A.E., Stepney, S., Clark, J. and Jacob, J. (2005) "Formalizing Anonymity: A Review. University of York Technical Report YCS 389" In: York Computer Science Technical Report SeriesYork computer science technical report series. University of York, Heslington, York. YO10 5DD. UK..

Teaching

  • Internet Technologies and Regulation

    Exploring the interplay between social and technological shaping of the Internet, and associated policy implications. It outlines the Internet's origins and technical architecture and its embeddedness in a long history of communication technologies.

  • Subversive Technologies

    This course aims to provide students with an understanding of technologies that provide control over information flows and action on the internet, and those that resist or subvert that control.

Videos

News

Events

Blog

Press

Integrity Statement

In the past five years my research has been financially supported by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Oxford Martin School, Google, and the Alan Turing Institute.