I am professor for Privacy Engineering and Policy-Aligned Systems (PEPSys) at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg’s faculty for Digital and Analytical Sciences, Austria. My research combines technical and non-technical (especially legal) aspects of cutting-edge, real-world, and enterprise- or society-grade technologies and systems. This particularly includes:

  • Techno-legal privacy engineering, especially also including aspects beyond anonymity and security
  • Novel technical concepts, mechanisms, and components fostering policy-alignment beyond privacy / data protection law
  • Metrics- and experiment-driven assessment and operation of privacy- and policy-alignment-techniques (e.g., anonymity guarantees, utility-metrics, performance-overheads, etc.)
  • Societal impacts of emerging technologies and techno-legal implications (“technology-policy co-design”)

Besides other activities, I co-lead Salzburg’s EXDIGIT initiative together with Manfred Tscheligi, Christine Bauer, and Franz-Benjamin Mocnik. For further and always up-to-date information, visit my profiles on Google Scholar, LinkedIn, and – with a more private focus – Twitter / X.

Contact me at frank.pallas@plus.ac.at.

Signature Publications

Pallas, F., Koerner, K., Barberá, I., Hoepman, J.H., Jensen, M., Narla, N.R., Samarin, N., Ulbricht, M.R., Wagner, I., Wuyts, K. and Zimmermann, C., 2024. Privacy Engineering From Principles to Practice: A Roadmap. IEEE Security & Privacy, 22(2), pp. 86-92.

Finck, M. and Pallas, F., 2020. They who must not be identified—distinguishing personal from non-personal data under the GDPR. International Data Privacy Law, 10(1), pp. 11-36.

Pallas, F., Ulbricht, M.R., Tai, S., Peikert, T., Reppenhagen, M., Wenzel, D., Wille, P. and Wolf, K., 2020. Towards application-layer purpose-based access control. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 1288-1296).

Grünewald, E. and Pallas, F., 2021. TILT: A GDPR-aligned transparency information language and toolkit for practical privacy engineering. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 636-646).

Projects and other Inquiries

Being dedicated to real-world systems and the respectively arising intricacies in bringing privacy and policy-aligned technologies into practice, I particularly enjoy spotting new challenges from and validating my reseearch results in real-world usecases. National and international projects as well as a broad variety of other collaborations with partners from research and industry are thus integral to my work (some exemplary previous projects are listed in our projects section). For respective inquiries, just get in touch and drop me a line.

Micro-CV

I received my Diploma and my Ph.D. in computer science from TU Berlin, Germany, followed by senior research positions at the KIT’s Center for Applied Legal Studies and the FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik – both in Karlsruhe, Germany. Before joining PLUS, I held an interim professorship for Computers & Law / Computers & Society at TU Berlin and was was senior researcher at TU Berlin’s department for Information Systems Engineering. In 2024, I was appointed as professor for Privacy Engineering and Policy-Aligned Systems (PEPSys) at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg.