Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is an Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Imperial College London, where he leads the Computational Privacy Group. He holds a joint affiliation between the Department of Computing and the Data Science Institute. His roles include serving as a Special Adviser on AI and Data Protection to the EC Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders, a Parliament-appointed Commissioner for the Belgian Data Protection Agency, and a Special Adviser to EC Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, co-authoring the 'Competition Policy for the Digital Era' report.

He earned his PhD from MIT in 2015 under Alex 'Sandy' Pentland. His master's degrees include an M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from UCLouvain, an M.Sc. (Centralien) from École Centrale Paris, and an M.Sc. in Mathematical Engineering from KU Leuven. He also holds a B.Sc. in Engineering from UCLouvain.

His research interests focus on computational privacy, anonymization techniques, AI safety, and machine learning attacks. He develops methods to 'red team' AI systems and create privacy-preserving mechanisms. His work addresses vulnerabilities such as membership inference, attribute inference, and re-identification risks in datasets, with applications to location tracking, synthetic data, and LLMs.

His articles analyze adversarial attacks against privacy systems, emphasizing robustness and practical guarantees. He advocates for privacy-by-design approaches in big data analytics and has explored ethical AI, competition policy in digital markets, and humanitarian uses of mobile data.

While no scientific awards are explicitly listed, his contributions have been widely covered in media. He is currently recruiting motivated PhD students for his group at Imperial College. His advising and grants narrative includes work on privacy-preserving technologies and policy implications of AI, with collaborations across academia and public institutions. He is affiliated with the Computational Privacy Group and contributes to platforms like OPAL for privacy analytics. His office is in the ACE Extension building (ACEX 259), accessible via Exhibition Road.