About
The Cybersecurity and Digital Trust UMR aims to promote a safe and secure digital world. As the digital transformation of our activities progresses, cybersecurity is becoming more complex and important than ever, affecting software, hardware, and human aspects. It aims to protect our digital data and assets but also to ensure that our interactions in the digital world are secure and respect our privacy.
Digital trust is trust in the people, processes, and technology that ensure the security and safety of our interactions in the digital world. It includes trust in the platforms we entrust with our private data, but also trust in the information shared online and in the artificial intelligence tools that are increasingly becoming an integral part of this digital world.
Areas of expertise
Protection of digital assets and human factors
- Network security and intrusion detection systems
- Security of IoT devices
- Software vulnerabilities
- Human factors in cybersecurity
Artificial intelligence and digital trust
- Automated agents in cybersecurity
- Algorithmic biases
- Use and risks of generative AI for code generation and analysis, as well as for society
- Explainable, responsible, and ethical AI
- Security issues of federated learning
- AI and its implications in (cyber)psychology and (cyber)psychiatry
Trust in the digital world
- Online information and disinformation
- Detection of deepfakes and identity theft
- Identity and privacy online and in the metaverse
- Multimodal biometrics and forensics
- Compression of large AI models for more secure edge applications
- Blockchain and its applications
Members and researchers
Zakaria Abou El Houda (INRS)
Zakaria Abou El Houda is an assistant professor at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), within the Energie Matériaux Telécommunications Centre. His research work encompasses the fields of network security and focuses, among other things, on artificial intelligence applied to cybersecurity, particularly to intrusion detection systems in critical networks (e.g. smart grids, the Internet of Things (IoT), industrial IoT), the study of the explainability and robustness of these systems, security in distributed/federated machine learning, and blockchain. He specializes in automation and security enhancement issues for next-generation networks (5G and beyond/6G).
Publications : https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=rrLpEjoAAAAJ
Zakaria Abou El Houda (INRS)
Anderson Ávila (INRS)
Dr. Anderson Avila is an assistant professor at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), within the Energie Matériaux Telécommunications Centre. His research focuses on areas such as federated learning for data protection, cyber defence, automatic processing of human languages, and biometrics. Dr. Avila obtained a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Federal University of São Carlos, a master’s degree from the Federal University of ABC, and a doctorate from INRS. Prior to his current position, he worked as a researcher in natural language and speech processing, focusing on model compression, low latency, and robustness in spoken language understanding.
Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Q0hJ-hAAAAAJ&hl=en
Anderson Ávila (INRS)
Stéphane Bouchard (UQO)
Professor Bouchard’s research projects focus on the development of virtual reality environments to treat complex anxiety disorders and pathological gambling, conducting clinical trials on the effectiveness of in virtuo exposure for anxiety disorders and leading experimental studies to understand why virtual reality is an effective therapeutic tool for generating strong emotional experiences. This work involves cybersecurity and digital trust in several respects, from the risks posed by access to highly confidential information to the consequences of experiences in the metaverse. Telepsychotherapy is another prolific field of research, where he conducts clinical trials and studies of the mechanisms underlying the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy applied via videoconference. Here again, the implications for cybersecurity and digital trust are important in guiding mental health professionals in the application of best cybersecurity practices. His research laboratory is home to Psyché, the only six-sided immersive vault dedicated to research in mental health and cybersecurity. He has received several awards and distinctions, including the Adrien Pinard prize in 2014 for his contribution to the field of psychology.
Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=WigdrgwAAAAJ
Stéphane Bouchard (UQO)
Alan Davoust (UQO)
Alan Davoust is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UQO. His research focuses mainly on the interaction of agents and/or people in computer systems. He is interested in distributed systems from a multi-agent perspective, particularly the interactions between people and automated agents, and the biases and issues of trust associated with these interactions. He is also interested in the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence and socio-technical systems.
Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=32SzsWcAAAAJ
Alan Davoust (UQO)
Tiago H. Falk (INRS)
Tiago H. Falk is a full professor at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), within the Energie Matériaux Telécommunications Centre. He is an expert in secure and adaptive human-machine systems and is currently working on projects to detect synthetic media (including deepfakes) and on the compression of large AI models for edge applications, privacy in the metaverse, biometrics robust to adversarial attacks, and trustworthy human-AI teaming. He directs the Multisensory Signal Analysis and Enhancement Lab, with locations at both UQO (Gatineau) and INRS-EMT (Montréal).
Publications: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=_i58BPYAAAAJ&hl=en
Tiago H. Falk (INRS)
Raphaël Khoury (UQO)
Raphaël Khoury is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO). His research focuses on software security and best secure programming practices. He is the author of the book “Software Security: A Defensive Approach” and is the recipient of research grants from FQRNT and NSERC.
Publications: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=bskziasAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Raphaël Khoury (UQO)
Partners
CIRICS, LRSI, LARIVIA, DRDC, Thales, Digital Trust Laboratory, InVirtuo, MYND Therapeutics, BMU Augmented Intelligence, COlab numérique, CyberQuébec, Ville de Gatineau, Beneva
The Joint Research Unit in brief
Events
News
- Monthly Cybersecurity Seminars –>
https://www.linkedin.com/company/inrs-uqo-unité-mixte-de-recherche-sur-la-cybersécurité
Networking activity: March 25, 2025. Information to come.
Student Research Day (winter 2025 edition): March 20, 2025 – more details to come
Student Research Day (summer 2024 edition)
- Séminaires mensuels sur la cybersécurité : Tous les derniers mercredis du mois
- Activité de maillage : 25 mars 2025. (Informations à venir).
- Journée de la recherche étudiante, édition d’hiver 2025 : 20 mars 2025. (Informations à venir).
- Journée de la recherche étudiante, édition d’été 2024
Les membres de l’UMR se distinguent lors de conférences internationales de premier plan, remportant plusieurs prix du meilleur article :
« Securing the Metaverse: The Intersection of Machine Learning-Based Oracles and Blockchain Technology » a reçu le prix du meilleur article à #IEEE iMETA 2024! Ce travail explore la fusion des oracles pilotés par l’IA et de la chaine de blocs pour améliorer la sécurité et la confiance dans le paysage évolutif du métavers.
« Securing O-RAN with Zero Trust Architecture and Large Language Models » a reçu le prix du meilleur article lors de la 4e conférence internationale sur les progrès des technologies de la communication et de l’ingénierie informatique (ICACTCE’24)! Cette recherche aborde les principaux défis en matière de sécurité dans le réseau O-RAN, en se concentrant sur l’intégration d’applications tierces non fiables (xApps) dans le contrôleur intelligent RAN (RIC) en temps quasi réel. En s’appuyant sur l’architecture de confiance zéro et les grands modèles de langage, l’approche renforce la sécurité dans les réseaux de la prochaine génération.
« Adapting Self-Supervised Features for Background Speech Detection in Beehive Audio Recordings ;» a reçu le prix du meilleur article présenté par un jeune chercheur lors de la conférence 2023 IEEE MetroAgriFor. Cette recherche montre les avantages de la compression et de l’adaptation de grands modèles d’IA pour des applications Edge plus sûres ; dans le cas de ce travail, pour la surveillance multimodale.
« Fairness in socio-technical systems : a case study of Wikipedia » a reçu le prix du meilleur article lors de la conférence internationale 2023 sur les technologies collaboratives (Collabtech’ 2023). Il examine les questions liées à l’équité et à la partialité dans Wikipédia et démontre que des phénomènes conceptuellement similaires aux biais algorithmiques, qui sont causés par les systèmes d’intelligence artificielle, peuvent être causés par des interactions complexes entre les personnes et la technologie et affecter les systèmes socio-techniques tels que Wikipédia.
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The UMR is always looking for summer interns, graduate and postgraduate students, and postdoctoral researchers. If you are interested, please send your CV, transcripts, cover letter, and list of publications to umr-cybersec@uqo.ca .
Contact
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