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.
