Angel Xuan Chang is an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University's School of Computing Science, affiliated with labs including 3DLG, GrUVi, SFU NatLang, SFU AI/ML, and VINCI. He holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and was a TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Fellow (2018-2022). His research bridges natural language processing (NLP), 3D scene understanding, and embodied AI, focusing on language-grounded 3D generation and biodiversity monitoring via DNA barcodes. Recent work includes NuiScene (unbounded outdoor scene generation), ViGiL3D (3D visual grounding dataset), and CLIBD (vision-genomics biodiversity analysis). He advises students in projects like BIOSCAN-5M insect dataset and embodied AI navigation. His 2025 highlights include multiple ICCV and ICLR papers, workshops at ICML and CVPR, and a CRV invited talk. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University (2014), advised by Chris Manning. Previous roles include visiting research scientist at Facebook AI Research and researcher at Eloquent Labs.
Yao Qin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), with dual affiliation in the Department of Computer Science. She concurrently serves as Co-Director of the REAL AI Initiative at UCSB and holds a Senior Research Scientist position at Google DeepMind, where she contributes to the Gemini Multimodal project. Her academic credentials include a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego (advised by Prof. Garrison W. Cottrell) and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Dalian University of Technology. During her doctoral studies, she completed internships with pioneering researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Ian Goodfellow. Dr. Qin's research program centers on machine learning robustness, with emphasis on adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution generalization, and fairness. She develops reliable AI systems specifically for healthcare applications, with diabetes management as a primary focus. Her lab explores critical themes including AI safety in multimodal models and diabetes-specific AI solutions, particularly exercise metabolism modeling and glycemic effect prediction. Recent publications reveal a strong trajectory in robust machine learning with cross-domain applications. Her work consistently bridges theoretical robustness concepts with practical healthcare implementations, particularly in diabetes care. Key publication venues include CVPR, ICML, NeurIPS, and ICLR, with notable contributions to out-of-distribution detection, adversarial transfer learning, and multimodal AI safety. Her distinguished recognition includes: EECS Rising Star at MIT (2021) UCSB Regents' Junior Faculty Fellowship Award Helmsley Charitable Trust award for Type 1 diabetes research UCSB Faculty Research Grant American Diabetes Association Abstract Award (ADA-2025) Dr. Qin actively mentors four PhD students—Mehak Dhaliwal, Andong Hua, Kenan Tang, and Youngseok Yoon—on projects spanning LLMs for diabetes, multimodal robustness, and generative time-series modeling. Her research is funded by the Helmsley Charitable Trust and UCSB, with recent grants supporting exercise-specific AID algorithms for diabetes management. As Co-Director of the REAL AI Initiative, she leads a research ecosystem focused on developing reliable artificial intelligence. Current lab activities include organizing workshops at NeurIPS-2024 (AdvML-Frontiers and AIM-FM) and developing next-generation diabetes management tools through collaborations with medical institutions.
Massimo Piccardi is a Professor of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision, and Machine Learning at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) , where he has been since 2002. He currently serves as the Head of the School of Electrical and Data Engineering and leads the Big Data Analytics program at the Global Big Data Technologies Centre. His research focuses on advancing NLP, machine learning applications in healthcare, and cybersecurity in IoT systems. He has authored over 200 journal papers and conference proceedings, secured significant ARC and CRC grants, and holds the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Contributor Award (2022). Education & Professional Roles: Joined UTS in 2002, progressing from Associate Professor (2002–2007) to Professor (2008–present). Serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Big Data and Editor for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. Active in professional societies including IEEE, ACL, and ALTA (President, 2023–2024). Research Interests: Core areas include NLP (translation, summarization, adversarial attacks), healthcare informatics (clinical NLP, health service analysis), and cybersecurity (IoT security, privacy-preserving systems). Cross-cutting themes include generative models, cross-lingual systems, and ethical AI. Grants & Projects: Principal Investigator on ARC Discovery/Linkage projects and CRC grants. Recent projects include controllable machine translation (Amazon), privacy-preserving digital agriculture, and STEM innovation (ASTRID project with NBN Co). Labs & Collaborations: Leads the UTS Global Big Data Technologies Centre, collaborating on projects like adversarial NLP attacks, medical machine translation, and secure IoT frameworks.
Yanzhi Wang is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University , affiliated with the Institute for Experiential AI and the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things . He holds a PhD from the University of Southern California (2014). His research focuses on real-time AI systems, deep neural network compression, neuromorphic computing, and non-von Neumann architectures. Notable projects include NSF-funded initiatives on age-inclusive urban design, superconducting computing (DISCoVER), and edge device optimization (PatDNN). He has received prestigious awards such as the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award and the Constantinos Mavroidis Translational Research Award. His work emphasizes algorithm-hardware co-design for energy efficiency, with grants from NSF, ARO, and industry partners like Google. Recent research trends reflect his focus on accelerating vision transformers, diffusion models, and large language models for edge computing. He has pioneered methods like AutoViT and Fastcar, addressing latency and resource constraints in mobile platforms. Collaborations span academia and industry, driving innovations in superconducting circuits and neuromorphic systems.
Sanjit A. Seshia is the Cadence Founders Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley . He is affiliated with the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science and participates in centers like the Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems Center , Berkeley AI Research , and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing . Research interests include formal methods for automated verification and synthesis of dependable systems, with applications to cyber-physical systems , AI-based autonomy , and computer security . His work spans SMT solving, model counting, syntax-guided synthesis, and algorithmic improvisation, with tools like UCLID5 , VerifAI , and Scenic for verifying autonomous systems and educational platforms like CPSGrader . Students and collaborators include notable researchers such as Dorsa Sadigh (Stanford), Daniel Fremont (UC Santa Cruz), and Hazem Torfah (Chalmers). He has co-founded startups like Decyphir and 20ⁿ Labs based on his research.
Heather Zheng is the Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, co-directing the SAND Lab (Security, Algorithms, Networking and Data) with Prof. Ben Y. Zhao. She holds IEEE (2015) and ACM (2023) Fellowships, and was recognized as MIT TR35 (2005) for cognitive radio research. Her work bridges mobile/IoT security, adversarial ML, and generative AI ethics. Zheng earned her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Maryland in 1999, with prior roles at Bell-Labs, Microsoft Research Asia, and UCSB. Education: PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park (1999) Research Focus: Explores cutting-edge challenges in: Security implications of mobile/IoT sensors (e.g., bracelet-of-silence countermeasures) Adversarial machine learning defense mechanisms (e.g., Blacklight attack detection) Generative AI governance (Glaze, NightShade copyright tools) Awards: ACM Fellow (2023) IEEE Fellow (2015) World Technology Network Fellow Labs & Collaborations: Leads SAND Lab focusing on security, ML, and networked systems. Active in UChicago's Systems Group exploring cloud/edge computing architectures.
Sanghyun Hong is an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science , focusing on Trustworthy AI and Cybersecurity . He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park (2021) and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University (2015). His research bridges machine learning , security , and privacy-preserving systems . Current research themes: Robustness of AI systems to adversarial attacks Privacy-preserving machine learning Security of pre-trained and large language models Hardware fault vulnerabilities in neural networks Cybersecurity workforce development Publication Trends (15 most recent): Focus on adversarial machine learning (jailbreaking LLMs, membership inference) Advances in physics-informed neural networks and time series forecasting Key contributions to AI security and malware detection Interdisciplinary work in visualization design and tsunami warning systems Scientific Accolades : Google Faculty Research Award (2023) Samsung Global Research Award (2022, 2023, 2024) DARPA Riser (2022) NSF SFS Award (co-PI, 2023) USENIX Enigma Speaker (2021) Academic Leadership : Mentors 5 Ph.D. students and has graduated 8 M.S. and B.S. students. Currently developing next-generation auditing frameworks for AI systems while on medical leave until Winter 2026.
Nils Holzenberger is an Assistant Professor at Télécom Paris, France, since February 2023, affiliated with the Data Intelligence Graphs (DIG) research team within the Information Processing and Communication Laboratory (LTcI). His work bridges artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and legal domains through neuro-symbolic approaches to statutory reasoning, particularly in tax law. Education: PhD in Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University (2017-2022) Master's in Engineering, Mines ParisTech (2013-2017) Preparatory Classes, Lycée Louis-le-Grand (2011-2013) Holzenberger's research centers on legal artificial intelligence with emphasis on statutory reasoning limitations in large language models. He pioneered the SARA dataset for tax law reasoning and LegalBench benchmark, developing hybrid symbolic-neural frameworks that expose LLMs' shortcomings in precise legal interpretation. His work integrates Prolog solvers with NLP techniques to create executable tax code mappings and contract analysis tools, establishing foundational methods for verifiable legal AI systems. Analysis of his 15 most recent publications (2019-2024) reveals three dominant research thrusts: (1) Tax law reasoning benchmarks exposing LLM hallucinations, (2) Neuro-symbolic integration for statutory interpretation, and (3) Low-resource template extraction for legal documents. His work consistently demonstrates that pure neural approaches fail at precise legal reasoning, necessitating symbolic grounding for reliable legal AI applications. The DIG research team at Télécom Paris, where Holzenberger leads legal AI initiatives, is actively hiring faculty for neuro-symbolic projects. While specific grant details aren't public, his collaborations with HEC Paris, Copilex startup, and featured podcast appearances indicate substantial industry-academia engagement in legal tech development. Holzenberger directs the legal AI vertical within LTcI's DIG team, focusing on data intelligence for statutory reasoning. His group develops tools for tax minimization strategy discovery, contract analysis, and legal information extraction, maintaining close ties with legal practitioners through projects like the Prolog-based tax code interpreter. The team's infrastructure supports both academic research and startup partnerships in computational law.
Yiping Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering. His research focuses on developing interdisciplinary approaches combining domain knowledge (differential equations, stochastic processes), machine learning, and experiments. Key interests include scientific machine learning (AI4Science), stochastic simulation, and robust machine learning. Education: Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Stanford University (2023) B.S. in Computational Mathematics, Peking University (2019) Research Highlights: Hybrid research integrating ML with scientific domains like PDEs and inverse problems Development of Physics-Informed Learning frameworks Contributions to deep learning theory (ResNets, neural collapse) Advances in kernel operator learning and adversarial robustness Awards: CPAL Rising Star Award (2024) University of Chicago Data Science Rising Star (2022) Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (2021) Labs/Teams: SCALE Lab (Scientific Computation and Learning at Northwestern) Collaborations with NYU's Courant Institute and Stanford
Juan Zhai is an Assistant Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She co-directs the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER) and is a member of the UMass NLP group. Her research advances software engineering through automated techniques for building high-quality systems with emphasis on behavioral specifications, AI safety, and trustworthy AI. Her work addresses the fundamental challenge of aligning software behavior with intended specifications through two main directions: automated specification synthesis (translating natural language comments to formal specifications via tools like C2S and LLMCup) and defect detection/repair (developing frameworks for AI system testing, bias mitigation, and training diagnostics). Her vision integrates these into end-to-end assurance systems that continuously validate, repair, and audit evolving software in dynamic environments. Recent publications (2024-2025) reveal dominant trends at the software engineering/AI intersection: formal specification synthesis for IoT and code generation, comment maintenance using LLMs, deep learning framework testing (DevMuT, Citadel), bias detection in LLMs, and automated training repair (AutoTrainer, DREAM). These contributions appear in top venues including ICSE, FSE, ASE, ISSTA, and ACL. Professor Zhai currently advises PhD student Gehao Zhang (focusing on Software Engineering and AI Safety) and actively recruits new PhD/Master's students. Her LASER lab develops practical tools for specification inference, LLM-driven synthesis, and trustworthy AI, while collaborating with the UMass NLP group on language-centric software analysis. The LASER lab, co-directed by Zhai, pioneers techniques for behavioral specification enforcement across traditional and AI-powered systems. Key projects include CPC for bidirectional code-comment analysis, ModelMeta for deep learning framework testing, and frameworks for bias mitigation across the ML lifecycle. The lab emphasizes practical, scalable tools that enhance correctness, robustness, and fairness in critical AI applications.
Mohit Iyyer is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), affiliated with the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) and the CLIP lab. Previously, he held roles at UMass Amherst, AI2, and completed his PhD at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on advancing NLP and machine learning, particularly in long-context LLMs, factuality evaluation, and human-LLM collaboration. Education : PhD, Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park (2017) MS, Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park (2014) BS, Computer Science, Washington University (2012) Research Interests : His work emphasizes improving instruction-following in LLMs, evaluating long-form text, detecting AI-generated content, and enhancing LLM robustness. He actively explores multilingual LLMs, literary translation, and creative writing support through AI. Key Contributions : Developed influential frameworks like ELMo and QuAC, and introduced benchmarks such as BEARCUBS and BooookScore. His work on watermarking (PostMark) and adversarial attacks (OverThink) addresses security and reliability in AI systems. Awards & Recognition : NSF CAREER Award (2021) Samsung AI Researcher of the Year (2022) Best Paper Awards at NAACL 2018 and CCS 2023 Advising & Grants : Advises a dynamic research group and has received grants for projects like multilingual QA and long-context LLM evaluation. Collaborates with industry partners like AI2 and DeepMind. Labs & Teams : Leads the CLIP lab at UMD, focusing on foundational NLP research and applications in literature, dialogue systems, and computational storytelling.
Chaowei Xiao is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (starting 2023), affiliated with the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences. His research focuses on securing AI systems, particularly exploring robustness in trustworthy machine learning, autonomous systems, and large language models (LLMs). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a B.S. from Tsinghua University. Before joining UW-Madison, he worked as a research scientist at NVIDIA (2020–2022) and at Arizona State University (2022–2023). His work bridges model and system perspectives to ensure practical robustness and provable guarantees in AI applications like autonomous driving, healthcare, and IoT. Key research areas include adversarial robustness, AI security, and ethical AI. Recent contributions include frameworks for detecting LLM hallucinations, mitigating jailbreak attacks, and securing multi-modal systems. His work on diffusion models for adversarial purification and physical-world attacks on autonomous driving systems has been widely recognized. Notable awards include the 2024 USENIX Security Distinguished Paper Award, ACM Gordon Bell Finalist (2024), and Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellowship. He has advised students like Xiaogeng Liu (NVIDIA Fellow) and secured grants from Amazon, Apple, and UW-Madison. His lab actively publishes at top venues like NeurIPS, ICML, and CVPR.
Leo Schwinn is a Lecturer at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) within the Department of Computer Science (I26), working in the Data Analytics and Machine Learning group supervised by Prof. Stephan Günnemann at the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology. His research focuses on robust machine learning with particular emphasis on data-efficient learning and robustness vulnerabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Dr. Schwinn's research interests span multiple critical areas in contemporary machine learning including: Robustness against adversarial attacks in LLMs Embedding space vulnerabilities and defenses Model unlearning and privacy preservation Efficient training methodologies for large models Time-series forecasting with probabilistic frameworks Graph-based machine learning approaches His work bridges theoretical understanding with practical security implications of modern AI systems. Analysis of his recent publications (2023-2025) reveals a strong focus on LLM security, with multiple papers accepted at premier conferences including ICML, CVPR, ICLR, and NeurIPS. His research demonstrates consistent innovation in identifying novel attack vectors while developing practical defense mechanisms, particularly through embedding space manipulation techniques. The work shows increasing sophistication in handling both theoretical aspects of model robustness and practical deployment concerns. His notable scientific achievements include: Receiving the ATE dissertation price for his PhD work at FAU Securing an oral presentation at ICLR 2025 Organizing the ICLR BlogPost Track Becoming a member of ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) Dr. Schwinn has served as review process chair for the 2024 Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents (CoLLAs) and actively collaborates with researchers at Mila Quebec AI Institute. His research group at TUM focuses on addressing fundamental challenges in machine learning robustness, particularly as they apply to real-world deployment scenarios where security and reliability are paramount. He maintains active GitHub repositories related to LLM security research, including circuit-breakers-eval and LLM_Embedding_Attack, demonstrating his commitment to open science and reproducible research in the field of AI security.
Varun Jog is Professor of Information Theory and Statistics in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS) at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Mathematics. Previously, he served as Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2016-2020) and at the University of Cambridge (2021-2024). His academic background includes a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay (2010) and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley (2015). Professor Jog's research centers on fundamental questions at the intersection of information theory, statistics, and machine learning. He develops theoretical frameworks for statistical inference under constraints such as limited communication and privacy requirements, with significant contributions to hypothesis testing, differential privacy, adversarial risk analysis, and information-theoretic inequalities. His work bridges abstract mathematical principles with practical applications in data science and robust machine learning. Recent publications demonstrate a concentrated focus on distributed inference systems, particularly examining sample complexity limits in hypothesis testing under information constraints and privacy-preserving mechanisms. His research consistently reveals deep connections between information theory and statistical learning, with increasing emphasis on adversarial robustness and foundational inequalities. His scientific contributions have earned recognition through prestigious awards: NSF-CAREER Award (2020) R. Narasimhan Memorial Lecture Award (2020) Eli Jury Award from UC Berkeley EECS Department (2015) Jack Keil Wolf student paper award at ISIT (2015) Professor Jog maintains an active research group, currently supervising one PhD student while having graduated four PhD students and four Master's students. His mentorship extends to postdoctoral researchers including Amir Asadi, Deepanshu Vasal, and Andre Wibisono. Research funding includes the competitive NSF-CAREER grant. He co-organizes the Cambridge Information Theory Seminar, fostering academic exchange and collaboration within the theoretical research community.
Huazheng Wang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. His research focuses on reinforcement learning, information retrieval, and trustworthy AI. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia (2021) and B.E. from the University of Science and Technology of China (2015). He holds awards including the 2025 EECS Fabulous Teacher Recognition and SIGIR 2019 Best Paper Award. His work addresses challenges in robust reinforcement learning, adversarial attacks on bandit systems, and applications in scientific discovery. Education: Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Virginia (2021) B.E., Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China (2015) Research interests emphasize developing efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning, multi-armed bandits, and their applications in recommendation systems, protein optimization, and security. Notable contributions include provably efficient risk-aware reinforcement learning frameworks and adversarial attack analysis on bandit systems. Recent work includes NSF-funded research on neural bandits (IIS-2403401) and publications in top venues like ICML, NeurIPS, and AAAI. His lab explores embodied LLM agents for team cooperation and federated collaborative online monitoring frameworks.
