Dr.-Ing. Imrana Yari Abdullahi

Patient-centered health care information systems (PHS) that leverage the power of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) PHS networks (e.g., Covid-19 proximity trackers) to store health records on patients’ edge devices, while allowing the individual device owners to take control of their data, are of increasing relevance. This paradigm shift is aligned well with large-scale efforts to re-decentralize the internet (e.g., Solid project by Tim Berners-Lee) and promises to support patients in taking ownership of their health data. While such advantages are enormous and may simplify the organizational challenges to implement data regulations, PHS on P2P networks raise concerns that patients have some responsibility in managing information security for their PHS. P2P networks also pose specific security issues while inheriting the same security issues that any other networked application running on the internet experiences. In P2P PHS, data will not only be in isolated, heterogeneous, and distributed environments but also pose new challenges to the conventional data transaction procedures employed in machine learning (ML) today.

My research interests and goals are two-fold: i) investigating the inherent privacy vulnerabilities resulting from security threats for P2P PHS and designing security models such as identity authentication protocols and trust reputation systems to provide additional security, ii) investigating and designing novel and secure federated machine learning frameworks for edge devices to collaboratively train ML models that patients can benefit from without divulging their medical information to a central entity.

Should you be interested in supervision of your thesis as a student, or possible research collaboration as a researcher or P2P PHS provider, which are relevant to any of my research interests, please do not hesitate to contact me.

• Security for Patient-Centered Healthcare Ecosystem
• Federated Machine Learning for Patient-Centered EHR

• 01/2021: Best Paper Award at the HICSS-54 Conference, January 4 – 8, 2021, Hawaii, USA
• 09/2018 – 03/2021: Merit Postgraduate Scholarship at PhD Level from German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
• 12/2018: Shining Star Award Issued by Kaduna Electricity Distribution Company (KAEDCO), Kaduna, Nigeria
• 09/2015 – 02/2017: Merit Postgraduate Scholarship at Masters Level from Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF)
• 2016: Fourth Place Winner at Cyber Security Challenge Sunderland Capture the Flag Event, University of Sunderland, UK
• 2013: Fourth Place Winner at ISPON National Software Conference and Competition, Calabar, Nigeria

Innovation Lab for Wearable und Ubiquitous Computing

Scrum Master for the following Team:

Palley

PalliCare

SmartBiathlon

Pentalobes

[B] = Bachelor’s Thesis, [M] = Master’s Thesis