Hello, this is Han
I am the Director of CyberPUNK Lab and an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. I am also a member of the Cyber Security group. My research interests are AI Security and Privacy.
Previously, I was a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, working with Prof. Aad van Moorsel on the EPSRC-funded AGENCY project, and a Research Associate at Newcastle University on the EPSRC-funded FinTrust project. I received the Alan Turing Institute’s Post-Doctoral Enrichment Award 2022.
📣 🎓 PhD Opportunities at ECS, University of Southampton 🇬🇧 Prospective PhD and visiting students interested in AI security and privacy are welcome to contact me via email.
Further details are available on my CV page.
News
🎉 Our paper "Revisit Location Privacy Protection: A Service Failure Perspective", a collaboration with Guangzhou University, was accepted to ACM CCS 2026. Congrats to all co-authors!
🎉 My PhD student Jiawei Wang received a Participation Scholarship to attend ACM-W Europe womENcourage 2026. Congratulations!
🏅 I was selected as a Gold Reviewer for ICML 2026.
🎉 My PhD student Shuyan Zou's paper "SlaClip: Gradient Norm Slacks can be Indicator for Adaptive Clipping in DP-SGD" was accepted to ICML 2026 as a Spotlight (top 2.2%) paper! Congratulations to Shuyan and all co-authors!
🎉 Our paper "An Adaptive Mini-Batching Strategy for Reliable Streaming Data Delivery in Real-Time" was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Reliability. Congrats to all co-authors!
🎉 My PhD student Jiawei Wang's paper "Peeling the Layers of Privacy-Utility Onion on Tabular Data" was accepted to the EuroMLSys Workshop, co-located with EuroSys 2026. Congratulations to Jiawei and all co-authors!
Hengyang Yao, from the University of Birmingham, joined CyberPUNK Lab as a PhD student. Welcome!
🎉 Our paper "FedEvolve: Evolutionary Tabular Data Synthesis in Vertical Federated Learning Systems" was accepted to the RSD Workshop @ AAAI 2026. Congrats to Adethya Srinivasan - such an achievement for a 2nd year BSc student!
My second PhD student Jiawei Wang has started, working on machine unlearning.
I was invited to Durham University for the RISCS Cybersecurity event, where I gave a talk on Auditing Privacy-preserving AI. Thanks to Dr Rebecca Owens and Dr Partha Das Chowdhury for the invitation!
I supported BSc Year 2 student Adethya Srinivasan in securing the Aniket Singh Scholarship to work on a 12-week research project in Vertical Federated Learning.
🔥 Our paper on Vertical Federated Learning is accepted by DSN 2025. Congrats!
One paper is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.
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!
My PhD student Shuyan Zou has started, working on privacy-preserving machine learning.
🔥 Our paper about personalisation in Shuffle Differential Privacy is accepted by USENIX Security 2025, with Honorable-Mention Award. Congrats to all authors!
Our paper about GAN-based social media bots is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems journal.
I organised the PrivacyML@ECS seminar at the University of Southampton.
I received the ECS Pump Priming Fund in the amount of £ 1,730.
I joined the University of Southampton as a lecturer in Cyber Security.
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.
One scoping review paper about online harms in smart homes is accepted by Future Generation Computer Systems journal.
I jointed University of Birmingham as a Research Fellow.
I finished my work as a Research Associate in Newcastle University.
One paper on Federated Learning attack is accepted by ISSRE 2022.