From April 2024, I am an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. I am part of the Cyber Security group, focusing on Dependable and Secure Machine Learning Technology. My research spans Federated Learning, Inference Attacks, Differential Privacy, Tabular Data Synthesis, and Machine Unlearning, aiming to advance secure and reliable machine learning systems for sensitive applications.

📣📣📣 🎓 PhD Opportunities at ECS, University of Southampton 🇬🇧🎓 Prospective students who are interested in privacy-preserving machine learning and cyber security, please contact me via email. For research topics, please refer to this brief introduction or the post. Visiting students are also welcome to apply.

Prior to joining SOTON, I was a Research Fellow (2023-2024) in the School of Computer Science at University of Birmingham. In this role, I worked with Prof. Aad van Moorsel on the EPSRC-funded AGENCY (£ 2.7M) project. I also worked as a Research Associate (2021-2023) for the EPSRC-funded FinTrust (£ 1.0M) project at Newcastle University. I am the awardee of the Post-Doctoral Enrichment Award 2022 granted by the Alan Turing Institute.

I obtained PhD degree in Computer Science from the Free University of Berlin in 2020. My PhD supervisor is Prof. Katinka Wolter. I received my Bachelor’s degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in 2013, and Master’s degree from Tongji University in 2016.

News

[2025-03]: 🔥Our paper on Vertical Federated Learning is accepted by DSN 2025. Congrats!
[2025-03]: One paper is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.
[2025-02]: I was invited to Heriot-Watt University to give a talk on “Together We Learn, Individually We Protect: A Vision For Differential Privacy”. Thanks to Prof Wei Pang for the invitation!
[2025-01]: My PhD student Shuyan Zou has started, working on privacy-preserving machine learning.
[2024-12]: 🔥Our paper about personalisation in Shuffle Differential Privacy is accepted by USENIX Security 2025. Congrats to all authors!.
[2024-08]: Our paper about GAN-based social media bots is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems journal.
[2024-08]: I organised the PrivacyML@ECS seminar at the University of Southampton.
[2024-05]: I received the ECS Pump Priming Fund in the amount of £ 1,730.
[2024-04]: I joined the University of Southampton as a lecturer in Cyber Security.
[2023-11]: Our project UnFed: Selective Forgetting in Federated Financial Applications received £ 20,000 grant from EPSRC Network Plus! I am the co-Investigator of this project.
[2023-03]: One scoping review paper about online harms in smart homes is accepted by Future Generation Computer Systems journal.
[2023-01]: I jointed University of Birmingham as a Research Fellow.
[2022-12]: I finished my work as a Research Associate in Newcastle University.
[2022-07]: One paper on Federated Learning attack is accepted by ISSRE 2022.