Ben Y. Zhao

     
portrait

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

News in Last 12+ Months

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!

May 2023: talks at ICLR Workshops

RTML, BANDS

April 2023: Veritas Forum

April 2023: More press on Glaze

NHK, Asahi, Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan)

Mar 2023: Keynote CASE Editors Forum

Mar 2023: AI/ML Media Advocacy Summit

A great event organized by the Concept Art Association and other creative artist guilds. I spoke in the AI Ethics panel along with Timnit Gebru, YouTube video.

Feb 2023: WTTW Chicago Tonight

Talking about protecting artists with Glaze

Feb 2023: NYT article on Glaze

NYTimes article by the great Kashmir Hill on Glaze, our new project to protect artists from style mimicry by AI-art models

CODE

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

Other Stuff

Google Scholar (~36,000), H-index: 77
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, including authentication and biometrics. My broad interests have led me to publish at a range of top conferences, including USENIX Security/Oakland/CCS, 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), 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
Spring 2023: Time/location TBD, CS30100 (Technical Writing and Presentations)
Clear, logical writing and presentations are foundational skills for computer scientists. This class is meant to introduce computer science students to basic ideas and techniques for effective communication in both writing and presentations. The class will include several complementary components, including critical analysis of technical papers, weekly writing assignments focusing on writing style, clarity, and logical flow, and discussions of style for different research areas and venues. The course is primarily targeted towards graduates students, although undergraduates can audit the class (or enroll with permission from the instructor). No prerequisites.

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'm always looking for bright PhD students!!
I'm always interested in self-driven/passionate students who want to work on high impact projects and have fun doing it. UChicago is a fantastic place to do a PhD, and we're constantly making improvements to the lab and the department. To find out a bit more about me as an advisor, and my views on everything from students to research and the meaning of life, you can read some of my posts on Quora, where I've been "Top Writer" since 2014. To get on a short list of names Heather and I will look for when reviewing applications, please fill out a basic form. This is better than email. 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 several spots open for fall 2022). 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.