Biography
I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. From Oct 2023 to July 2024, I was a MC2 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) at the University of Maryland, College Park. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, advised by Prof. David Evans and Prof. Yuan Tian at UCLA. I am interested in machine learning for security and the trustworthy aspects of machine learning, especially in malicious training environments. My work has been published in top-tier machine learning (ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR) and cybersecurity venues (USENIX Security, IEEE S&P).
I am looking for self-motivated students to work on trustworthy machine learning and machine learning for security. If you are interested, please fill out the questionnaire and send me an email at suya[at]utk[dot]edu.
News:
- Our work on adversarial hubness is accepted to IEEE SP 2026, DASH is accepted to CVPR 2026, HAMLOCK is accepted to USENIX Security 2026!
Materials:
- CV.
- Trustworhy Machine Learning
- Machine Learning for Security
Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of Virginia
B.Eng. (Honors) in Electrical Engineering
China Agricultural University
Selected Publications
Group
I advise students working on data poisoning and backdoors, adversarial robustness, and the security of the machine learning stack — from the training data down to the accelerator.
Ph.D. Students
- Sanskar Amgain (Fall 2025 – present) — hardware-model combined security
- Ony Hoque (Fall 2026 – present) — trustworthy federated learning, co-advised with Stella Sun
M.S. Students
- Qipan Xu (Fall 2025 – present) — machine learning runtime Trojans
I am looking for self-motivated students to work on trustworthy machine learning and machine learning for security. If you are interested, please fill out the questionnaire and send me an email at suya[at]utk[dot]edu.
Experience
