PhD position on Adaptive Privacy and Differential Privacy for Energy Data

The Open University (OU) is offering a PhD position within the SHARE project’s Adaptive Privacy and Legal Compliance work package. The candidate will design and evaluate adaptive privacy‑preserving techniques for energy consumption data, combining differential privacy, privacy attacks and utility optimisation. Research will involve analysing temporal and spatial patterns, implementing membership‑inference and reconstruction attacks, and creating optimisation frameworks that balance privacy guarantees with analytical usefulness. Collaboration with Radboud University and the distribution system operator Alliander will ensure real‑world relevance, and the work will culminate in an open‑source privacy layer for the SHARE toolbox.

• Design and implement adaptive differential‑privacy mechanisms for energy consumption datasets.
• Analyse how temporal, spatial and rare‑event patterns affect re‑identification risk using metrics such as uniqueness and entropy.
• Develop and evaluate privacy attacks including membership inference, reconstruction, re‑identification and attribute inference.
• Formulate privacy‑utility trade‑offs as optimisation problems that respect statistical, temporal and physical constraints.
• Collaborate with researchers at Radboud University on physics‑informed generative models for synthetic energy data.
• Work with the distribution system operator Alliander to test the practical impact of the proposed privacy methods.
• Contribute code and documentation to the open‑source SHARE toolbox privacy layer.