Research Assistant, Analysis of Digital Documents (PSAC-RC) - Applied Computer Science *Work-Study Program*

### **NOTE:** **Students must be approved for the 2026-27 Work-Study program in order to be hired for this position. The Work-Study Student Application form is available online here: Work Study Program | Awards | The University of Winnipeg: https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/awards/work-study-program.html** **Please include confirmation of your approval to participate in the Work-Study Program with your application.** **Work-Study Project Title:** Analysis of Digital Documents **Competition Number:** WS02.26 **Date Posted:** November 10, 2026 **Department:** Applied Computer Science **Researcher:** Dr. Mary Adedayo **Position Vacancies:** 1 **Salary:** $17.22 - $20.10 per hour plus 6% vacation pay Research Assistants are normally students, in a University of Winnipeg undergraduate program, employed to assist with tasks related to research. Work is performed within defined guidelines and under supervision of a more senior researcher or faculty member. **Position Overview:** The student will work as an assistant on a research project developing approaches for forensic examination of digital documents, e.g., PDF files. While the are physical methods for determining the authenticity of physical documents, the use of the underlying internal structure of digital documents for this purpose is under-explored, particularly in PDF documents, which have prevalent uses. The goal of this work is to explore the internal representation of PDF documents, which can be expressed as a tree structure. Specifically, this project will explore the identification of tampered documents through the tree structure to develop a difference algorithm and a simple tool to determine tampered documents. This work will involve the development of an algorithm for analyzing tree structures in PDF and an exploration of the impact of common changes on the tree structure. We will also examine the identification of digital signatures and explore ways to represent changes based on the internal tree structure. The assistant will be required to provide support in achieving the objective of this work. This will range from conducting a literature review to the implementation and testing of simple algorithms, and providing support in the production of research materials and outputs. **Duties:** * The selected candidate will be required to conduct a literature review to understand the current progress in the area of research. They will implement certain algorithms in an applicable programming language (e.g., Java, Python, C, or C++), depending on their experience. The student may be required to learn to use some open-source forensics tools and apply them in the analysis of sample data. They may be required to create synthetic data or obtain research data from different digital forensics research data corpora. The student will be involved in writing up results from the study and preparing them for publication. **Qualifications** * The assistant must have a good understanding of com