RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

 By Nathan Rutherford In April I had the pleasure of travelling to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to present our paper, **[An Empirical Study of C to Rust Translation using Local Large-Language Models]( https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/files/71513373/llm4code26.pdf)** , at the 3rd International Workshop on Large Language Models for Code (LLM4Code) 2026, co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The aim of the workshop was to share ideas and results related to the application of large language models (LLMs) to code-related problems within software engineering, while also enabling discussion around emerging challenges in the area. The workshop covered topics including benchmark development for evaluating LLMs, dataset creation, and code generation, with a particularly strong focus on agentic AI systems. The keynote talks provided useful insights into how both academia and industry are leveraging these systems, from improving artefact evaluation for rese...

 By Jessica Mcclearn      After a long winter of writing my PhD thesis, I was very happy to wake up and drink espressos in the early morning sunshine of Barcelona for a much-needed caffeine boost before heading to the ACM CHI conference for a week! The ACM conference on Computer-Human Interaction is the largest conference in the field, with over 5000 in-person attendees over five days. The main reason I attended CHI this year was to support a co-author during their presentation of our work on help-seeking for fraud and scams, a research project we worked on together while interning at Google in the NYC office. Through an analysis of 405 Reddit posts, we explored the motivations and hooks for scam engagement before delineating how people seek help for scams across different stages. We did so by developing a taxonomy of scam types and then analysing scammers' emotional and technical tactics for engaging targets. We expanded prior frameworks in HCI literature and sugg...