Prospective students

I am looking for motivated students that want to do research with me on various privacy topics. My main research topics are:

• Privacy-preserving searchable encryption.
• Privacy-preserving machine learning.
• Anonymous communications.
• Differential privacy.

I am open to work on other privacy-related topics as long as there is some common interest. The privacy problems that I work on usually rely on looking for ways in which an attacker could learn sensitive information about the users of a system. For this, I rely on mathematical techniques such as Bayesian inference or maximum likelihood estimation, and sometimes leverage machine learning to help with solving optimization problems. My research has a strong statistical component, so you should be comfortable with probability theory, Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, etc. To learn more about the type of work that I do, you can skim through some of my works on searchable encryption (e.g., perhaps the easiest is this paper [slides]), anonymous communications (e.g, this paper [slides]), or machine learning (this paper).

If you want to apply, please send me an email and include your resume/CV. Please include the following in your email subject, to show that you have read this website: “[Prospective Student]”. I will not reply to emails that do not include this in the subject. Also check the general admission process of ECE UBC.

If you are using ChatGPT to generate the email, please be aware that ChatGPT generates emails that look very fancy, but do not convey a lot of information. Please write an email that is clear and concise. Read the email that you are writing and see if it needs all of those word decorations and fancy word choices. I would say 95% of the application emails that I receive are using ChatGPT in a way that is detrimental to the application.