Dr. Man Ho Allen Au received his PhD degree from the University of Wollongong in 2009. He is now an assistant professor and a director of the Monash-PolyU-Collinstar Joint Lab on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Technologies at the Department of Computing, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include information security and blockchain technology, and related industrial applications.
Dr. Au has an outstanding publication record in major security outlets. He has published over 140 refereed papers in top journal and conferences, including ACM CCS, ACM SIGMOD, NDSS, IEEE TIFS, TC, TKDE, etc. His work has been cited over 3600 times and his h-index is 34 (Google Scholar), both exceptional achievements for a researcher at his current level. He is a recipient of the 2009 PET runner-up award for outstanding research in privacy enhancing technologies. He received best paper awards from conferences including ACISP 2016 and ISPEC 2017.
Dr. Au’s research has generated significant social and economic impact. This can be seen from the generous support he received from funding agencies and the industry. In the past 3 years, he has, as the principal investigator, attracted over 21 million HKD in research and high-level consultancy projects. His digital signature technology has been adopted by the Hyperledger Fabric project, the most popular blockchain infrastructure supported by big industry players like IBM, Intel and SAP. His analysis on privacy, and design of new privacy-preserving techniques for confidential transactions, has been discussed and reported by leading privacy-friendly currencies such as Monero.
Dr. Au is also an active member in the community. He is a general or program chair of many international conferences and security workshops, such as NSS2014, GPC2015, ProvSec2016, NSS2018, etc. For professional services, he is an expert member of the China delegation of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 working group 2 - Cryptography and security mechanisms and a committee member of the Hong Kong Blockchain Society R&D division.