Parisa Rezaee Borj, has successfully defended her PhD entitled “Online Grooming Detection on Social Media Platforms” on Tuesday, 18 April, 2023. Her work is carried out in the Norwegian Biometrics Laboratory at the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology. Here is a summary:

Online grooming detection has become a critical research topic in the era of extensive data analysis. It is essential to protect vulnerable users, particularly adolescents, against sexual predation on online platforms and media. However, many factors challenge online grooming detection, which leads to a high-risk problem for youth. The primary goal of Parisa's research work is to provide techniques that increase children’s security on online chat platforms. To this extent, many experiments have been conducted to create models fulfilling our research goal. As such, her thesis contains a comprehensive survey of child exploitation in chat logs that provides the readers with a deep knowledge of the problem, possible research gaps, and proposed solutions. In her research, she splits the online grooming detection problem into several subproblems, including author profiling, predatory conversation detection, predatory identification, and data limitations issues.

Assessment Committee:

• opponent: Professor Fabio Crestani, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• opponent: Professor Inger Marie Sunde, Norwegian Police University College, Norway
• Internal member: Associate Professor Katrien De Moor, NTNU, Norway

Parisa’s main supervisor has been Prof. Patrick Bours (IE/IIK) and co-supervisors Prof. Dorothee Beermann Hellan (HF/ISL) and Prof. Kiran Raja (IE/IDI).

Congratulations!!!

Gratulerer til Parisa Rezaee Borj med fullført doktorgrad! Fra venstre: Førsteamanuensis Katrien De Moor, professor Inger Marie Sunde, Parisa Rezaee Borj, førsteamanuensis Kiran Raja og professor Patrick Bours. Foto: Pål Oppegård-Herje / NTNU.