Yang Zhang to become Faculty at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Currently, he is employed as a research group leader. From January 2017 to December 2018, Yang was a postdoc with Michael Backes. Prior to that, he obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Luxembourg under the supervision of Sjouke Mauw and Jun Pang.

Yang’s research interests lie at the intersection of privacy and machine learning. His research topics can be broadly categorized into two themes. First, he develops machine learning algorithms to quantify and mitigate privacy risks stemming from a variety of human-generated data, such as social network data, biomedical data, and location data. Second, he investigates novel attack surfaces against machine learning algorithms and develops privacy-enhancing techniques to mitigate the discovered risks. Besides, Yang also works on social network analysis and algorithmic fairness.