Elisa Chiapponi has spent five weeks, from the 14th February to the 22nd March, at RC3 in KAUST as a visiting student. The visit was made in the context of her Ph.D. in digital security, carried out under the supervision of Prof. Dacier. Elisa is enrolled in the Sorbonne Université of Paris and she conducts her research at EURECOM, in the south of France. Her project is a collaboration with Amadeus IT Group.
Her thesis focuses on the analysis and mitigation of scraping activities of e-commerce websites. The goal is to find practical means to defeat scraping bots. The starting point of her project is to understand the scraping ecosystem. This consists of identifying the actors behind the scraping business and their motivations, understanding the various techniques they exploit and the infrastructures they take advantage of.
Currently, Elisa is running an Internet-wide measurement campaign with two dozen machines to assess the severity and modus operandi of scraping bots. During her stay in KAUST, she fine-tuned the tests performed in the experiment and finalized the construction of the infrastructure in which the data are collected and queried. She performed multiple analyses of the collected data and she discussed in the depth the results of these studies with the RC3 team. Moreover, during her stay, she submitted a paper about the industrial perspective of the fight between scraping bots and e-commerce websites.
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