Supervisors

Suitable for

Abstract

In response to the increasing centralisation of the World Wide Web and the concerns such centralisation raises (e.g. privacy violations, censorship, loss of individual autonomy, etc), decentralised personal online data stores (pods) have emerged as a promising alternative. A leading example is Solid (https://solidproject.org). However, there remain a number of unsolved challenges in ensuring that this kind of alternative is as useful for people as the existing Web, encouraging adoption and further development. This project will explore how some recent advances in AI can be integrated in Solid. An example challenge that the project could focus on is how to provide Google-like search features in Solid environment, for public, communal and private data, while respecting the decentralised nature of Solid. The student will not only propose novel solution(s) to address the technical challenges but also empirically analyse the proposed solution and compare with baselines. Interested students are welcome to contact Rui Zhao and Naman Goel to discuss or propose their own ideas related to above (rui.zhao@cs.ox.ac.uk, naman.goel@cs.ox.ac.uk).

Prerequisites: - Willingness to learn new technologies - Good understanding of distributed systems - Good understanding of the Web architecture - Technical experience with at least one of the following will be a big plus: - Solid - RDF / Linked Data / Semantic Web / Knowledge Graph - NLP / LLM, and (text) similarity search - Confident with an appropriate language to work with AI and/or Solid, especially Python or JS/TS

References:

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41019-024-00263-w 2. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589335.3651251 3. https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/PrivateData.html