Xiaolin Xu

Xiaolin Xu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. His research focuses on hardware and AI security, machine learning privacy, and energy-efficient deep learning. He earned a PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and completed postdoctoral work at the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research.

Education

• PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2016
• M.S., B.E., University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Research Interests: His work spans secure hardware design, AI model protection, and embedded systems security. Notable projects include securing FPGA-based ML accelerators and developing defenses against adversarial attacks.

Recent Article Trends: Recent publications emphasize robustness in neural architectures, secure multi-party computation, and lightweight graph-based models for edge devices.

Grants & Awards

• 2025 DAC Under-40 Innovators Award
• NSF CAREER Award (2023)
• Multiple NSF grants for hardware security research

Advising: Supervises PhD students including Shijin Duan and Jiaxing, focusing on ML security and hardware-software co-design.