Contact Info
Office
Crerar 361

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 an ACM distinguished scientist, and recipient of the NSF CAREER award, MIT Technology Review’s TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35), ComputerWorld Magazine’s Top 40 Tech Innovators award, Google Faculty award, and IEEE ITC Early Career Award. His work has been covered by media outlets such as Scientific American, New York Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, MIT Tech Review, and Slashdot. He has published more than 160 publications in areas of security and privacy, machine learning, networked systems, Internet measurements and HCI. He served as Program (co)chair for the World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016) and the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2018), and General Co-Chair for ACM HotNets 2020.

Research

Focus Areas: Adversarial Machine Learning, Human Computer Interaction, Networking, Security and Privacy

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 and mobile systems.

Research

AI & Machine Learning

Foundations and applications of computer algorithms making data-centric models, predictions, and decisions

Data & Databases

Systems and algorithms for managing and analyzing data at scale

Security & Privacy

Understanding and defending against emerging threats in our increasingly computational world

Systems, Architecture & Networking

Design and analysis of computing systems: cloud, edge, Internet, quantum, and beyond

Labs & Groups

Systems Group

A vibrant, collaborative research community with diverse, synergistic research interests spanning systems, programming languages and software engineering, software and hardware...

SAND (Security, Algorithms, Networking and Data) Lab

Ben Y. Zhao, Heather Zheng
SAND Lab spans research topics in security, machine learning, networked systems, HCI, data mining and modeling.

News & Events

Three UChicago PhD Students From The Department of Computer Science Named To Forbes 30 Under 30 List

Nov 28, 2023

UChicago Researchers Win Internet Defense Prize and Distinguished Paper Awards at USENIX Security

Sep 05, 2023

UChicago Scientists Develop New Tool to Protect Artists from AI Mimicry

Feb 13, 2023

Professors Rebecca Willett and Ben Zhao Discuss the Future of AI on Public Radio

Jan 26, 2023

UChicago AI Summit Examines Promise and Concerns for Science and Society

Nov 01, 2022

UChicago CS Students Emily Wenger and Xu Zhang Receive Harper Fellowships

Sep 14, 2022

Three UChicago CS Security Projects Receive Funding From c3.ai Institute

Mar 25, 2022

UChicago CS Prof. Ben Zhao Named ACM Fellow

Jan 19, 2022

Your Unique Muscle Response Could Become a New Approach to Digital Authentication

Apr 15, 2021
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