Lei Yu is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Before that, he was a Staff Research Scientist at IBM Research, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. His research interests include data privacy and security, big data & ML systems, Trustworthy AI, cloud and mobile computing. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science on the topic of big data privacy and deep learning with differential privacy from Georgia Institute of Technology. He also holds a Ph.D. degree from Harbin Institute of Technology, China.
To prospective graduate students: Multiple Ph.D student (RA) positions are available. I am looking for self-motivated students who have strong interests in data privacy/system security, Trustworthy AI, exploiting and optimizing machine learning systems, starting in Fall 2024. If you are interested, drop me an e-mail with your CV and transcripts, and also please apply here and mention my name in your application.
My work and research
My recent research interests focus on data privacy, machine learning security and AI techniques for system security. My research on data privacy targets at identifying privacy threats and risks during different phases of data life-cycle and the issues of existing privacy protection designs, and developing principled privacy-preserving algorithmic and systematic solutions. The goal is to effectively protect data privacy and ensure regulatory compliance while preserving data utility.
At IBM Research I worked on large-scale log based system anomaly detection, AI-Ops, system data privacy identification and protection, and machine learning system optimization. My past research involved wireless sensor network and its security, cloud computing, and algorithmic solutions for improving the performance of distributed systems.