Welcome

My name is Marios Belk, I work in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Centered Computing. I received a PhD in Computer Science (Dec. 2015) from the University of Cyprus (#84 World's Best Young University 2020 - Times Higher Education).

I am co-founder and CEO of Cognitive UX GmbH, Heidelberg, Germany, which is an IT company aiming to develop AI-driven and human-centered cybersecurity and privacy systems. I am also a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Open University of Cyprus within the Cognitive Systems Master's programme.

Highlights

Elsevier IJHCS
From Hot-spots towards Experience-spots: Leveraging on Users' Sociocultural Experiences to Enhance Security in Cued-recall Graphical Authentication

Constantinides, A., Fidas, C., Belk, M., Pietron, A., Han, T., Pitsillides, A.
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 149, Elsevier, 2021 - Impact Factor: 3.16
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2021.102602

Elsevier CHB
The Interplay between Humans, Technology and User Authentication: A Cognitive Processing Perspective

Belk M., Fidas C., Germanakos P., Samaras G.
Computers in Human Behavior, 76, 184-200, Elsevier, 2017 - Impact Factor: 5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.06.042

Springer HCI Book
Human-Centred Web Adaptation and Personalization - From Theory to Practice

Germanakos, P., Belk, M.
Human-Computer Interaction Series, Springer, 2016
ISBN: 978-3-319-28048-6, Springer Link

Latest News

Mar. 2021

I am happy to serve as Principal Investigator of Cognitive UX GmbH for the European project TRUSTID, which has been approved by the European Commission with a total funding of €291,310. TRUSTID is a joint European partnership project between the University of Patras (Greece), University of Cyprus (Cyprus), the Institute of Systems and Robotics - University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Cognitive UX GmbH (Germany). The project aims to build and evaluate intelligent and continuous online student identity management for improving security and trust in European Higher Education Institutions.

Feb. 2021

Our article "From hot-spots towards experience-spots: Leveraging on users' sociocultural experiences to enhance security in cued-recall graphical authentication" has been accepted at the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.

Jan. 2021

I am co-organizing the third edition of the APPS workshop on Adaptive and Personalized Privacy and Security (APPS 2021), at ACM UMAP 2021, June 21-25, 2021, Utrecht, the Netherlands & Online, with Argyris Constantinides, Christos Fidas, Juliana Bowles and Andreas Pitsillides. Check out the Call for Papers

Jul. 2020

It has been a pleasure to run the second edition of the APPS workshop on Adaptive and Personalized Privacy and Security (APPS 2020) at ACM UMAP 2020, July 18, 2020, online from Genoa, Italy, together with Christos Fidas, Juliana Bowles, Elias Athanasopoulos and Andreas Pitsillides.

Mar. 2020

Our paper "A cross-cultural perspective for personalizing picture passwords" has been accepted at the ACM User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2020) papers' main program (23% acceptance rate). The work has been conducted in collaboration with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Feb. 2020

Our paper "An eye gaze-driven metric for estimating the strength of graphical passwords based on image hotspots." has been accepted at the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2020) papers' main program (16% acceptance rate).

Jan. 2020

Our paper "The SERUMS tool-chain: Ensuring Security and Privacy of Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems" has been accepted at the IEEE BigData 2019 conference.

Jun. 2019

I serve as publicity chair at the 27th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2019), which will be held in Larnaca, Cyprus.

Jun. 2019

I am happy to run the first workshop on Adaptive and Personalized Privacy and Security (APPS 2019) at ACM UMAP 2019, June 9-12, 2019 in Larnaca, Cyprus, together with Christos Fidas, Elias Athanasopoulos and Andreas Pitsillides.

Feb. 2019

Two late-breaking work papers accepted at ACM CHI 2019, entitled FlexPass: Symbiosis of seamless user authentication schemes in IoT and Picture passwords in mixed reality: Implementation and evaluation.

Jan. 2019

I am happy to participate in the EU Horizon 2020 Serums project - Securing Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems. In Serums I will work as the Research Coordinator of the University of Cyprus' team and Work Package Leader (WP5 – Authentication and Trust) aiming to apply a User-Centered Design process for defining new methods and tools for patient-centric user authentication.