Alberto Blanco-Justicia (male, 1989) is an assistant professor at Universitat Rovira i Virgili. He received his M. Sc. in Computer Security and Intelligent Systems in 2013 from URV with a master's thesis titled Anonymous and contactless accreditation method for groups of users with an outstanding graduation award. In 2015 he was awarded an FI-DGR grant to develop his doctoral studies. He received his Ph. D. degree in Computer Science in 2017 from URV with a grade of excellent cum laude, with a thesis titled Cryptographic protocols for privacy-aware and secure e-commerce, centered around e-commerce services which preserve the anonymity and privacy of clients.

His research interests include data protection and the development of privacy technologies, combining cryptographic and non-cryptographic techniques such as data anonymization and the use of distributed architectures. He also conducts research in the field of trustworthy, private, and secure artificial intelligence, focusing on the security and integrity of training models in federated or distributed machine learning, as well as measures to protect against the leakage of private or confidential data by machine learning models.

He has published 16 articles in indexed scientific journals, including high-ranking journals such as ACM Communications, ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 1 book chapter, and 18 articles in peer-reviewed international conferences. As of January 2025, he has received 888 citations, with an h-index of 16.

He has also supervised two doctoral theses both awarded excellent cum laude, and is currently supervising

two more students.

He has participated in or led various projects at the European (5), national (10), and international (3) levels.

Specifically, he has been actively involved in the European projects FP7 Inter-Trust, H2020 CLARUS, H2020 CANVAS, H2020 SoBigData++, and H2020 MobiDataLab. Regarding national projects, he has participated in SECloud, E-AEGIS, 2012R2B-02, ARES, SmartGlacis, CONSENT, and CURLING, the ARES Excellence Network, and the Strategic HERMES project. He is currently the principal investigator of the INCIBE-URV Cybersecurity Chair. Additionally, he has been involved in the PRIVATEDISCOUNT project funded by Google, the UKRI GRAIMatter project, and the "Mitigating Ethical Risks in Large Language Models through Localized Unlearning" project funded by IBM-University of Notre Dame.

He has also participated in 5 technology transfer contracts with national and international public and private

companies and entities, one of which he led as principal investigator: "Digital Forgetting in Large Language Models" and "Security & Privacy Technical Analysis in Federated Learning" for Huawei, "Technical Consultancy on Citizen Participation" for the IMI of the City Council of Barcelona (PI), "Post-quantum Cryptography Specialization" for LEAR Corporation, and "Demonstrator Project for Applied Research in the Development of Advanced Mobility Solutions for Pricing and Payment of Smart Services on Public Roads" for Abertis Telecom.

His involvement in projects and transfer contracts has led him to collaborate with companies in the ICT and

cybersecurity sectors, such as Google, Huawei, IBM, WithSecure, Thales, Indra, and Akkodis, as well as with

public organizations related to healthcare, such as the Hospital Clínico de Barcelona-IDIBAPS and NHS Scotland.