Panu Puhtila

About me

I’m Panu Puhtila, MSc in Computer Science, BA in Comparative Religion, a scientist, artist and writer. Currently I’m working as a Project Researcher at the University of Turku while starting my PhD -studies, from which I will transition to the position of full-time Doctoral Researcher in 2025. In my free time I read, juggle, dance and write a book about people with unusual spiritual worldviews.

Previous Research and Career

My academic career has been focused mainly on researching similar topics as my PhD will be, in other words on website privacy research, with a little side dish of sustainability-in-software-engineering -research. Apart from research I’ve also dipped my toes to the murky waters of teaching by creating and designing materials for courses on green programming and software engineering and supervising bachelor’s thesis work. Before being employed by the academia I worked as a website developer for several years while studying computer science.

PhD Research

My PhD research, as you might have guessed at this point, will be about developing a system to automatically detect and (hopefully) prevent privacy violations plaguing modern-day websites. To this end, I will design and develop a system to crawl through websites, record the network traffic happening from them to third parties, analysing it with LLM and storing these results in to database.

The database will be queried by browser plug-in which I will develop for consumer purposes, or a desktop application developed for research and engineering purposes, with the end goal of presenting the stakeholders an accurate information on the potential privacy violations and threats on a particular website. Detailed research plan can be found here.