I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. My research interest centers around AI Security, with emphasis on Adversarial Machine Learning, and Adversarial Network Analysis, Data Security and Privacy. My general research goal is to make intelligent systems secure, robust, privacy-aware, and trustworthy.
Join our group: We are always looking for self-motivated Ph.D. student/Research Assistant/Post-doc to join our group. I'm also happy to work with masters or undergraduate students at PolyU. If you are interested, please send me an email.
Remote Research Assistant: Candidates from Mainland China universities can also choose to work remotely with us. The salary ranges from 1k - 8k RMB / month, depending on your profile. Thanks to the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China!
Current Research
We are now actively working on the following topics:- Adversarial Machine Learning over Graphs: our research focuses on analyzing the adversarial robustness of various machine learning models over graph data, such as Graph Neural Networks, Graph Contrastive Learning, and Recommendation Systems. We aim to assess their vulnerability by creating effective attack strategies and developing defense approaches to enhance their adversarial robustness.
- Adversarial Robustness of Graph-based Anomaly Detection: lots of graph analytic tools (e.g., social network analysis tools, GNNs, etc.) are used for anomaly detection. We study how to attack these tools and further develop defense approaches to make them robust.
- Security of Signed Graph Analysis: we study the security issues of analytic tasks over a specifical type of graphs termed signed graphs.
- Data Security and Privacy in Distributed Learning: while the distributed learning framework (e.g., Federated Learning) allows us to jointly learn from distributed data, there are important security issues, such as how to preserve user data privacy and how to ensure the learned machine learning model is robust and trustworthy under distributed attacks.
News
- [06/2024] I am serving as the TPC Co-chairs for Communications and Information Security at ICNC'25. Please consider submitting your papers! It is in Hawaii!
- [05/2024] Our work on certified robustness of GNNs is now accepted to ICML 2024. Congratuations to Yuni Lai!
- [03/2024] Congratulations to Longling Geng, our Alumnia and former PolyU COMP Undergraduate student, on her acceptance into Stanford as a graduate student!
- [03/2024] Our work on making graph learning models provably robust is now accepted to IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) 2024. Congratuations to Yuni and Yulin.
- [05/2022, Grant] We got a grant from PolyU to conduct research on cleaning graph data against attacks. Multiple RA positions are available.
- [11/2021] Our work on structural attacks against graph-based anomaly detection is accepted for publication at ICDE'22. Congratuations to Yulin and Yuni.
- [09/2021] With our collaborator Prof. Xiapu Luo, one paper on structural attacks against Android malware detection is accepted to CCS'21.
- [09/2021] With our collaborator Prof. Tomasz P. Michalak, one paper on attacking sign prediction in signed graphs is accepted to ICDM'21.
- [08/2021] Yu Bu and Yuni Lai officially joined our group STiL as Ph.D. students. Welcome on board!
- [08/2021, Grant] Our project "Structural Attacks to Trust Analysis Systems in Signed Social Networks" is funded by the Young Scientist Fund, National Natural Science Foundation of China. ("针对符号社交互信网络分析系统的结构性攻击研究"，国家自然科学基金青年基金。)
- [06/2021, Grant] We are grateful that our project "Adversarial Robustness of Graph-based Anomaly Detection under Structural Attacks" is funded by the University Grants Committee (UGC) through the Early Career Scheme (ECS). A preliminary study BinarizedAttack: Structural Poisoning Attacks to Graph-based Anomaly Detection is released on arXiv.
- [06/2021, Grant] Our another project "Attacking Black-box Recommendations via User Profiles Generation under Hierarchical-structure Policy Gradient" is funded by the University Grants Committee (UGC) through the General Research Fund (GRF). I am happy to join this project as a Co-Investigator.
Academic Path
- Assistant Professor, Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2020.7 - Present
- Post-doc, Vanderbilt University, 2018.5 - 2018.8, then moved to Washington University in St. Louis, 2018.8 - 2020.4
- Ph.D., Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State University, 2013.8 - 2018.5
- B.S., Shanghai Jiao Tong University, (电院), 2009.9 - 2013.7
Recent Community Service
Associate Editor- IET Communications, 2020 - Present
- 2022: AAAI, IJCAI, AAMAS, AAAI TRASE workshop, CIKM
- 2021: IJCAI, AAMAS