Modern cybersecurity in operational industrial environments faces overwhelming challenges: low visibility of the security status of systems and critical infrastructures, diverse stakeholder roles with varying levels of cybersecurity expertise, and inefficient information exchange—all of which lead to low overall cybersecurity awareness. Hanning Zhao’s dissertation introduces role-specific security visualization that supports both security professionals and non-experts in easily detecting anomalies and responding to security incidents more efficiently.
Her work investigates how visual representations can be developed to increase cyber situational awareness in two industrial environments: the maritime industry and building automation. By combining principles from information visualization, human–computer interaction, and cybersecurity analytics, Zhao proposes a framework that transforms raw security data into intuitive visual models.
“Security visualization has often been leveraged to support security analysts, but now it is also an effective tool to empower non-experts to see security in a multi-stakeholder environment. It not only helps different stakeholders detect threats faster but also enables them to develop a shared understanding of security, facilitating a collaborative cyber defence,” Zhao explains.
The dissertation provides new design insights into creating visualizations tailored for different stakeholder roles. Another contribution of this dissertation lies in applying open standards for security incident exchange among different stakeholder roles. The research also introduces a novel LLM-assisted usability evaluation method. Zhao’s findings are applicable to other industrial domains, especially where team security awareness and collaboration are essential. The developed security dashboards and LLM-assisted usability testing results of this research have been made publicly available to support reproducibility and future references.
Hanning Zhao currently works as doctoral researcher at Software Engineering (TASE) group, where her research focus on visual analytics, human-computer interaction, and human-AI collaboration.
Public defence on Friday 14 November 2025
The doctoral dissertation of MSc Hanning Zhao in the field of Computer Science titled Visualizing Operational Cybersecurity: Enhancing situational awareness in industrial internet of things environmentswill be publicly examined at the Faculty of The Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, at Tampere University at 12 o’clock on Friday 14.11.2025 at Hervanta campus, Tietotalo, at the auditorium TB109 (Korkeakoulunkatu 1, Tampere).
The Opponent will be Associate Professor Tomohiro Morikawa of University of Hyogo and Professor of Practice Nikolaos Papakonstantinou from Aalto University. The Custos will be Associate Professor David Hästbacka from Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University. The work has been co-supervised by D.Sc (Tech) Bilhanan Silverajan from Tampere University.