Ting Yu
Professor of Computer Science
Research interests
Professor Yu’s research focuses on the intersection of security and AI. On the one hand, he investigates how advanced AI capabilities can help solve some of the hardest problems in cyber security, including intrusion detection, malware analysis, software vulnerability detection and automated fixing, and threat intelligence extraction and sharing. On the other hand, we investigate the security and privacy issues of AI solutions, especially when they are applied in systems beyond traditional domains. Email
Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Yu was a researcher at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and served as the research director of cyber security, leading a team of scientists, engineers and research associates to develop novel technologies to enhance the security of critical infrastructures. Prior to that, from 2003 to 2013, he was a faculty member at North Carolina State University. Professor Yu has published more than 100 research papers and more than 10 patents in the area of cyber security and data privacy. He previously served on the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions of Privacy and Security (TOPS) and the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Systems (TDSC), and on the technical program committees of numerous security and databases conferences.
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003.
- M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, 1998.
- B.Sc. in Computer Science, Peking (Beijing) University, China, 1997.
- HBKU Tech Team Award, 2023.
- Best paper award, ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, 2018.
- Best paper award, Annual IFIP WG Working Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy, 2015.Best paper award, ACM Conference on Access Control Models and Technologies, 2012.
- Research Scholarship, K.C.Wang Education Foundation, Hong Kong, 2010.
- CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (NSF), 2008.
- David J. Kuck Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Awards, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003.
- Euijin Choo, Mohamed Nabeel, Doowon Kim, Ravindu De Silva, Ting Yu, Issa Khalil: “A Large Scale Study and Classification of VirusTotal Reports on Phishing and Malware URLs”, The 2024 ACM SIGMETRICS/IFIP PERFORMANCE Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE 2024, Venice, Italy, June 10-14, 2024.
- Saravanan Thirumuruganathan, Fatih Deniz, Issa Khalil, Ting Yu, Mohamed Nabeel, Mourad Ouzzani: “Detecting and Mitigating Sampling Bias in Cybersecurity with Unlabeled Data”, USENIX Security Symposium 2024.
- Euijin Choo, Mohamed Nabeel, Mashael AlSabah, Issa Khalil, Ting Yu, Wei Wang: DeviceWatch: “A Data-Driven Network Analysis Approach to Identifying Compromised Mobile Devices with Graph-Inference”, ACM Trans. Priv. Secur. 26(1): 9:1-9:32 (2023).
- Yun Shen, Yufei Han, Zhikun Zhang, Min Chen, Ting Yu, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang, Gianluca Stringhini: “Finding MNEMON: Reviving Memories of Node Embeddings”, ACM Conference on Computers Security, 2022.
- Saravanan Thirumuruganathan, Mohamed Nabeel, Euijin Choo, Issa Khalil, Ting Yu: “SIRAJ: A Unified Framework for Aggregation of Malicious Entity Detectors”, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2022.
- Ningyu He, Ruiyi Zhang, Haoyu Wang, Lei Wu, Xiapu Luo, Yao Guo, Ting Yu, Xuxian Jiang: EOSAFE: “Security Analysis of EOSIO Smart Contracts”, USENIX Security Symposium 2021.