I currently hold a fractional appointment as Senior Lecturer of Practice in Computing at Western Sydney University. I was previously an Assistant Professor at the Singapore Institute of Technology, and before that a Sessional Lecturer at Victoria University Sydney. Over various roles in various institutions I've taught programming, mathematics, software design and software performance.

Outside my university position, I offer freelance research, software development and technical writing services under the name A Little Research.

I received a PhD from the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney in 2001, and was afterwards a research fellow in multimedia security at the University of Wollongong and the University of Calgary. I was later a software engineer at the Queensland University of Technology Library and Intersect.

Selected Publications

This is a selection that I think best represents my research, in reverse chronological order of publication. See my Google Scholar profile for a complete list.

N. P. Sheppard. Can Smart Contracts Learn From Digital Rights Management? IEEE Technology & Society Magazine 39(1), March 2020, pages 69-75. [Publisher]

N. P. Sheppard. Digital Copyright Protection — Some Success But Mostly Failure. The Conversation, 12 August 2014. [Open Access]

N. P. Sheppard and R. Safavi-Naini. On the Operational Semantics of Rights Expression Languages. ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management 2009, Chicago, Illinois, USA, pages 17-28. [Publisher]

N. P. Sheppard. On Implementing MPEG-21 Intellectual Property Management and Protection. ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management 2007, Alexandria, Virginia, USA, pages 10-22. [Open Access]

N. P. Sheppard and R. Safavi-Naini. Protecting Privacy with the MPEG-21 IPMP Framework. International Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2006, Cambridge, UK, pages 152-171. [Open Access]

N. P. Sheppard and R. Safavi-Naini. Sharing Digital Rights with Domain Licensing. ACM Workshop on Multimedia Content Protection and Security 2006, Santa Barbara, California, USA, pages 3-12. [Open Access]

R. Safavi-Naini, N. P. Sheppard and T. Uehara. Import/Export in Digital Rights Management, ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management 2004, Washington DC, USA, pages 99-110. [Open Access]

N. P. Sheppard, R. Safavi-Naini and P. Ogunbona. Secure Multimedia Authoring with Dishonest Collaborators. EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, Special Issue on Multimedia Security and Rights Management, October 2004, pages 2214-2223. [Open Access]

J. H. Kingston and N. P. Sheppard. On Reductions for the Steiner Problem in Graphs. Journal of Discrete Algorithms 1(1), 2004, pages 77-88. [Publisher]