I am a research group leader at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarland Informatics Campus.

My research interests lie at the intersection of privacy and machine learning. My research topics can be broadly categorized into two themes. First, I develop machine learning algorithms to quantify and mitigate privacy risks stemming from a variety of human-generated data, such as social network data, biomedical data, and location data. Second, I investigate novel attack surfaces against machine learning algorithms and develop privacy-enhancing techniques to mitigate the discovered risks.

From January 2017 to December 2018, I was a postdoc with Michael Backes at CISPA. Prior to that, I obtained my Ph.D. degree from University of Luxembourg on November 2016 under the supervision of Sjouke Mauw and Jun Pang. I obtained my bachelor (2009) and master (2012) degrees from Shandong University, China.

Research Areas

• Privacy with Machine Learning [CCS’17] [WWW’18] [NDSS’19-1] [NDSS’20]
• Privacy of Machine Learning [NDSS’19-2] [CCS’19] [USENIX Security’20]
• Social Network Analysis [WWW’19]
• Algorithmic Fairness [IJCAI’19]

What’s New

• I will join the TPC of CCS 2020!
• One paper titled “Updates-Leak: Data Set Inference and Reconstruction Attacks in Online Learning” got accepted in USENIX Security 2020! See you in Boston!
• I will join the TPC of ESORICS 2020!
• One paper titled “Towards Plausible Graph Anonymization” got accepted in NDSS 2020! See you in San Diego!
• One paper titled “MemGuard: Defending against Black-Box Membership Inference Attacks via Adversarial Examples” got accepted in CCS 2019! See you in London!
• I will join the TPC of TheWebConf (WWW) 2020!
• One paper titled “How to Prove Your Model Belongs to You: A Blind-Watermark based Framework to Protect Intellectual Property of DNN” got accepted in ACSAC 2019!
• I will be a lecturer at the InForSec summer school from July 15th to 16th at Southeast University, Nanjing.
• I will be a lecturer at the “Let’s GoSSIP” summer school from July 20th to 24th at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai.
• One paper titled “Fairwalk: Towards Fair Graph Embedding” got accepted in IJCAI 2019. See you in Macao!
• I will join the TPC of Socinfo 2019 and TPC of PPML!
• Our new technical report on data set inference and reconstruction attacks in the online learning setting is online.
• I will join the TPC of PETS 2020!
• Our paper “MBeacon: Privacy-Preserving Beacons for DNA Methylation Data” got distinguished paper award at NDSS 2019!
• My solo-auhtored paper “Language in Our Time: An Empirical Analysis of Hashtags” got accepted in WWW 2019 as an oral presentation! See you in San Francisco!
• I will join the TPC of ISMB/ECCB 2019!
• I will join the TPC of CCS 2019!