Ben Zhao is the Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at University of Chicago. He completed his PhD from Berkeley (2004) and his BS from Yale (1997). He is a Fellow of the ACM, TED/AI speaker, and a recipient of the TIME100/AI (TIME Magazine 100 Most Influential people in AI), Concept Art Association’s Community Impact Award, USENIX Internet Defense Prize, MIT Technology Review’s TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35), NSF CAREER award, ComputerWorld Magazine’s Top 40 Technology Innovators award, IEEE ITC Early Career Award, and Faculty awards from Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
His work has been covered by many media outlets including New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC, BBC, MIT Tech Review, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and New Scientist. His current research focuses on protecting human creatives from harms of generative AI. He has published over 190 articles in areas of security and privacy, machine learning, networking, and HCI. He served as TPC (co-)chair for the World Wide Web conference (WWW 2016) and ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2018), and on the Steering Committee of IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML).
Research
Focus Areas: Adversarial Machine Learning, Security and Privacy, Human Computer Interaction, Networking
Over the years, I’ve followed my own interests in pursuing research problems that I find intellectually interesting and meaningful. That’s led me to work on a sequence of areas from P2P networks, online social networks, SDR/open spectrum systems, graph mining and modeling, user behavior analysis, to adversarial machine learning. Since 2016, I’ve mostly worked on security and privacy problems in machine learning algorithms and systems.
