Yangheran (Lawrence) Piao
Cybersecurity, Privacy and Trust PhD Student
About Me
I am a second-year PhD studnet at the School of Informastic, University of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Prof. Ross Anderson, Dr. Daniel Woods and Dr. Jingjie Li. My current research interests include security economics, usable security, vulnerability markets and cybercrime.
Previously, I was a research assistant and got my master’s degree in Cyberspace Security at the Wuhan University, where I worked on secure data sharing and online social networks security supervised by Prof. Xiaohui Cui. I received my B.Eng. in Information Security from Beijing Information Science & Technology University under the advice of Dr. Junling Ren while working on malicious webpage detection.
News and Updates
- 9/2024 My paper titled “Study club, labor union or start-up? Characterizing teams and collaboration in the bug bounty ecosystem” has been accepted for IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2025.
- 7/2024 My poster titled “Finding bugs with friends: Incentivizing vulnerability discovery through teaming and collaboration” was presented at PETS 2024, Bristol, UK.
Selected Publication
- Yangheran Piao, Temima Hrle, Daniel W. Woods, Ross Anderson. Study club, labor union or start-up? Characterizing teams and collaboration in the bug bounty ecosystem. In 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P’25), 2025
- Pengyuan Chen, Lei Zhao, Yangheran Piao, Hongwei Ding, et al. Multimodal visual-textual object graph attention network for propaganda detection in memes. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 83(12), 2024, 36629-36644
- . Future Internet, 13
- Kai Ye, Yangheran Piao, Kun Zhao, Xiaohui Cui. Graph enhanced bert for stance-aware rumor verification on social media. In International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN’21), 2021
- Yangheran Piao, Kai Ye, Xiaohui Cui. Privacy inference attack against users in online social networks: a literature review. IEEE Access, 9, 2021, 40417-40431
Teaching
- Teaching Assistant:
- Usable Security and Privacy (INFR11158/11230), University of Edinburgh, Spring 2025
- Security Engineering (INFR11208/11228, 74 students), University of Edinburgh, Spring 2024 (Teaching Videos, PDF of the Book)
- Network Security (3150530011021, 52 students), Wuhan University, Spring 2020
- Assisting in Master’s Thesis Advising:
- Harita Lolla (2023-2024)
Professional Activities
- Reviewers: The Journal of Supercomputing (2024), Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024), Electrical Engineering (2024), The Computer Journal (2023), Electronics (2022)
Contact
- Email: lawrence.piao [at] ed.ac.uk
- Office address: 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh
