Ben Y. Zhao

     
portrait

Contact:
ravenben+w at cs dot uchicago dot edu
Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Linkedin.

News in Last 12+ Months

Oct 2024: LightBox Expo

Oct 2024: Distinguished Paper @ CCS

Congrats to Anna, Josephine, Ronik and Shawn for their CCS distinguished paper award!

Oct 2024: TED AI

Giving a TED AI talk on Oct 22.

Sept 2024: TIME Magazine AI100

Humbled to be named to TIME Magazine AI100 most influential in AI.

Sept 2024: Nature article

Quoted in Nature article on hidden risks of AI.

August 2024: Model implosion @CCS

Congrats to Wenxin, Cathy, and Shawn! This paper explains how Nightshade causes model implosion in diffusion models.

June 2024: NeurIPS AC

May 2024: CA State Assembly Hearing

CA Assembly hearing on Use of AI in Film, Music, and the Fine Arts. Recording

May 2024: Panel @Creative Tokyo

AI & Creativity Panel, Creative Tokyo, Sumida City, Tokyo

May 2024: DLSP Keynote @IEEE S&P

April 2024: GenAI detection @CCS

Congrats to Anna, Josephine, Ronik, Shawn and Reid for their generative AI image detection paper, to appear at ACM CCS 2024

March 2024: Blog @ UN CSTD

I wrote a short piece on the consequences of replacing human creatives with generative AI for United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development.

March 2024: Nightshade @IEEE S&P

Congrats to Shawn, Wenxin, Josephine, Stanley. The Nightshade paper will appear at IEEE S&P 2024

Jan 24-26, 2024: Stockholm Sweden

Keynote at Konstnärernas Riksorganisation, Artist Assoc. of Sweden

Dec, 2023: USCO

Dec, 2023: AoP, London

Assoc. of Photographers

Nov, 2023: Shawn/Jenna/Emily named to Forbes 30 under 30!

Nov, 2023: Chicago Innovation Award

Nov, 2023: TIME Best Inventions 2023

Glaze wins special mention in TIME magazine

Nov, 2023: Testimony, IL State Legislature

Oct 27-29, 2023: Lightbox

Oct 25, 2023: C3.AI DTI Workshop

Oct 18-19, 2023: KPMG/Booth Economic Forum

Oct 9, 2023: Distinguished lecture, Columbia CS

Sept 2023: Salsa Picante @CCS

Congrats to Cathy and Emily for their Salsa Picante paper to appear at CCS!

Sept 2023: Optimal Loss @NeurIPS

Congrats to Wenxin, Arjun and Princeton collaborators on their NeurIPS Spotlight paper!

August 2023: Glaze on CNN

CNN Article on Glaze & artists that use it.

August 2023: Glaze wins 2 awards

Glaze receives Distinguished Paper Award and USENIX Internet Defense Prize 2023!

July 2023: NYT AI Panel

June 2023: OUSD TAIA Workshop

on deception in AI

June 2023: NeurIPS AC

May 2023: keynote @ BigTen+ conference

May 2023: Glaze and Keystroke inference papers at Usenix Security 2023

Congrats to Shawn, Zhuolin, Jenna, Yuxin, Emily, Zain!

CODE

Clickstream modeling code here
Measurement-calibrated graphs here
Embedding graph coordinate systems here

Other Stuff

(UChicago Calendar)
Google Scholar (~37,000), H-index: 78
Erdos # = 3 (Erdos-M. Saks-K. Hildrum-B. Y. Zhao)
This page, circa 2011

I am a Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at University of Chicago. Over the years, I've worked on a number of areas from P2P networks, online social networks, cognitive radios/dynamic spectrum, graph mining and modeling, user behavior analysis. Since 2016, I've focused on security and privacy in machine learning and wearable systems. Since 2022, I work primarily on adversarial machine learning and tools to mitigate harms of generative AI models against human creatives in different industries. My primary research venues are CCS/Oakland/USENIX Security. In the past, my broad interests led me to publish at a range of top conferences, including NeurIPS/CVPR, IMC/WWW, CHI/CSCW, and SIGCOMM/NSDI/Mobicom. Here's a wordle of paper abstracts around 2019.

I am Director of Graduate Studies at UChicago Computer Science. For DGS related questions, please email me at "dgs at cs dot uchicago dot edu".

Together with Prof. Heather Zheng, I co-direct the SAND Lab (Security, Algorithms, Networking and Data) at University of Chicago. I received my PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2004, where I was advised by John Kubiatowicz and Anthony Joseph, and created the Tapestry distributed hash table (dissertation). I received my MS from Berkeley in 2000, and my BS in computer science from Yale in 1997. I am an ACM Fellow (2021), a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2005), USENIX Internet Defense Prize (2023), TIME Magazine AI100 (2024), MIT Tech Review's TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35) (2006), IEEE Internet Technical Committee's Early Career Award (2014), and one of ComputerWorld's Top 40 Technology Innovators under 40. Back when my kids were small and I had "free time," I wrote about research and PhD life on Quora.

Teaching, Fall 2024 (Prereq: CMSC 14300).
CMSC 14400-1 (Systems Programming II), M/W/F 9:30-10:20AM, Ryerson 251
CMSC 14400-2 (Systems Programming II), M/W/F 10:30-11:20AM, Ryerson 251

This course is a continuation of 14300, and covers the basics of computer systems from a programmer’s perspective. Topics include machine language programming, exceptions, code optimization, performance measurement, system-level I/O, and concurrency. Students will gain further fluency with debugging tools and build systems.

Press/Media: Recent media coverage of our research, including New York Times articles (by the amazing Kashmir Hill) on our art anti-mimicry tool Glaze, our image cloaking tool Fawkes, and our Bracelets of Silence, an ultrasonic, wearable microphone jammer for personal privacy.

Project Links


I read all my emails. But due to the volume of emails, I am often unable to reply to individual emails. If you are looking for a summer undergraduate internship, please do not email me directly. UChicago CS has organized a summer undergraduate internship program with more info here. If you are a high school student or undergraduate looking for a summer internship related to data, you might be interested in the DSI Data and Computing Summer Lab. SAND Lab is involved in both programs, although the number of interns we take each summer can vary depending on the applicant pool.

UChicago Undergraduates interested in research?
We generally advise 3-5 undergraduates in my lab in active research (we have 1-2 spots for fall 2024). If you're interested in working in my lab as an undergrad, drop me an email. Generally speaking, the best way to join my lab as an undergrad is to take and do well in my courses in networking or applied ML.