I am a faculty member at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security.

Previously, I was a research group leader at CISPA. From January 2017 to December 2018, I was a postdoc with Michael Backes. 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.

My research interests lie at the intersection of privacy and machine learning. 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. Besides, I also work on social network analysis and algorithmic fairness.

What’s New

  • [June 2020] I will be a lecturer at the InForSec summer school from July 17th to 19th.
  • [June 2020] One paper titled “LEAF: A Faster Secure Search Algorithm via Localization, Extraction, and Reconstruction” got accepted in CCS 2020!
  • [May 2020] One paper titled “GAN-Leaks: A Taxonomy of Membership Inference Attacks against Generative Models” got accepted in CCS 2020!
  • [April 2020] I won a best reviewer award at The ICLR workshop on Trustworthy ML co-located with ICLR 2020!
  • [April 2020] One new technical report on measuring the rise of Sinophobic behaviors on the Web driven by COVID-19 is online, and I have talked to The Washington Post about it.
  • [March 2020] One paper titled “Membership Inference Against DNA Methylation Databases” got accepted in EuroS&P 2020!
  • [February 2020] I will join the TPC of PETS 2021!
  • [February 2020] I will join the TPC of RAID 2020!
  • [December 2019] Starting from February 2020, I will be a tenure-track faculty at CISPA!
  • [December 2019] I will join the TPC of The ICLR workshop on Trustworthy ML co-located with ICLR 2020!
  • [December 2019] I will join the TPC of CCS 2020!
  • [December 2019] One paper titled “Updates-Leak: Data Set Inference and Reconstruction Attacks in Online Learning” got accepted in USENIX Security 2020! See you in Boston!
  • [November 2019] I will join the TPC of ESORICS 2020!
  • [October 2019] One paper titled “Towards Plausible Graph Anonymization” got accepted in NDSS 2020! See you in San Diego!
  • [September 2019] One paper titled “MemGuard: Defending against Black-Box Membership Inference Attacks via Adversarial Examples” got accepted in CCS 2019! See you in London!
  • [December 2019] I will join the TPC of TheWebConf (WWW) 2020!
  • [August 2019] 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!