Hello👋

This is my personal website, that I should use to showcase work but always forget.

Who am I?

Zaur

I'm a PhD student at University College Dublin (UCD) in the School of Information & Communication Studies, researching Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) under the supervision of Dr. Brendan Spillane and co-supervision of Dr. Benjamin R. Cowan, funded by a scholarship from the ADAPT Centre.
I've obtained degrees in Economics, Computer Science, and Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. I was awarded an AI scholarship by the European Union for my postgraduate education. I'm passionate about open-source intelligence (OSINT), and began working as a freelancer after graduating with a master's degree in CS. They say client satisfaction is often a good indicator of one's proficiency, and I have repeatedly worked with international clients on various intelligence projects with success.

Memberships

  • International Association of Crime Analysts (IACA)
  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
  • European Association of Crime Analysts (EACA)
  • Royal Statistical Society (RSS)
  • Association of Crime & Intelligence Analysts (ACIA)
  • Information Systems Security Association (ISSA)
  • International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts (IALEI)

Interests

  • Disinformation: Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI)
  • Digital Communication: Computational Propaganda, Social Media Manipulation
  • Security Studies: Hybrid Warfare, Counterintelligence, Geopolitical Risks
  • Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text Analytics, Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT)
  • Cyberspace: Cyberwarfare, Cyber Operations, Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)

Latest Projects

Disinformation-as-a-Service: The Emerging High-Risk Criminal Networks of Influence Operators

Won the Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award at CEPOL's Research and Science Conference 2024/2025 on Tackling the world of High-Risk Criminal Networks

PolyTruth: Multilingual Disinformation Detection using Transformer-Based Language Models

Proceedings of the AIDEM 2025: International Tutorial and Workshop on Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics and Democracy

Strategic Manipulation: Influence Operations and Climate Change Disinformation

Published a short article in the Defence Forces Review 2024 on IOs and climate disinformation.

Propaganda and Information Dissemination in the Russo-Ukrainian War: NLP on Narratives

Preprint of an NLP paper on looking at narratives on Twitter/X at the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Contact Me