Zhang Tianwei

Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University's College of Computing and Data Science, serving as Deputy Director of the Cyber Security Research Centre @ NTU (CYSREN) and Associate Director of the NTU Centre Computational Technologies for Finance (CCTF). His research focuses on building trustworthy, efficient, and intelligent systems with emphasis on security and privacy across AI, robotics, and cloud infrastructures.

Educational background:

• Bachelor of Physics, Peking University, 2011
• Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, 2017

Research spans five core domains: Generative AI Safety (vulnerability identification, safety testing, misuse detection), Deep learning security (adversarial examples, backdoor attacks, privacy protection), Robotics security (perception system attacks, safety testing), Machine learning optimization (workload scheduling, acceleration), and Computer architecture security (side-channel defenses, cloud security). His work bridges theoretical security with practical system implementations across diverse applications.

Recent publications (2024-2026) reveal intense focus on securing generative AI systems, particularly text-to-image models and large language models, with significant contributions to red teaming methodologies, backdoor attack mitigation, and multimodal security. Emerging trends show expanding research into autonomous vehicle security and privacy-preserving machine learning with cryptographic techniques.

Key awards include:

• Distinguished Artifact Award (CCS 2024)
• Stamatis Vassiliadis Best Paper Award Nominee (FPL 2024)
• Outstanding Paper Award (ACL 2024)
• Distinguished Artifact Award (Usenix Security 2024)

Actively supervises PhD students and research staff while leading multiple high-impact grants:

• Ongoing: NRF CREATE Quantum Security (2025-2029), Continental NTU Corp Lab Automotive HPC (2025-2028), CRPO EV Charging Security (2025-2027)
• Completed: MoE AcRF Tier2 IP Protection (2022-2025), NTU S-Lab Efficient GPU Scheduler (2020-2025)

Leads research within CYSREN and TAICeN (Trustworthy AI Centre NTU), directing interdisciplinary teams that investigate security threats across AI deployment stacks while developing practical defenses for real-world systems.