About Me

Posted on June 28, 2022  •  3 minutes  • 568 words  •

Biosketch

I’m a 2nd year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Michigan and a member of the Real-Time Computing Lab (advised by Prof. Kang Shin ). Currently, my research focuses on the intersection between usable privacy and machine learning. As an undergraduate student, I was a part of the Wisconsin Privacy and Security Group working with Prof. Kassem Fawaz , Prof. Varun Chandrasekaran , and Prof. Somesh Jha on machine learning security and privacy. In the past, I have interned at Roblox Corporation and Optum (UHG) as a software engineer. Despite the challenges, I am having a wonderful time being a PhD student.

I am open to being hired for internships and residencies!

You can check out my 1-page resume , my full CV , or my research statement .

Please contact me via byron123t [at] gmail [dot] com, bjaytang [at] umich [dot] edu, or +1 (630) 880-3691.

Experience

• Research Assistant | Fall 2021 - Present | University of Michigan
  • Researching usable privacy tools for analyzing and controlling online data privacy.
• Research Assistant | Fall 2018 - Summer 2021 | University of Wisconsin - Madison
  • Involved in 4 research projects, I contributed with experiment design, writing, evaluations, dataset creation, literature surveys, and more.
• Software Engineering Intern | Summer 2019 - Summer 2019 | Roblox
  • Using test-driven development, I designed and implemented core features for Roblox Studio’s script editor.
• Software Engineering Intern | Summer 2018 - Summer 2018 | Optum
  • I designed and developed a web application which aggregates and visualizes over 50 million records from security scans and databases.

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science | 2021 - 2026 | University of Michigan
  • Thesis: Title to be determined
• M.S. in Computer Science | 2021 - 2023 | University of Michigan
• B.S. in Computer Science | 2017 - 2020 | University of Wisconsin - Madison

Skills

• English
• Mandarin Chinese (Intermediate)
• Japanese (Elementary)
• French (Elementary)
• Security
• Privacy
• Computer Vision
• Machine Learning
• Human Computer Interaction
• Mobile Computing
• Python
• JavaScript
• C++
• SQL
• HTML
• TensorFlow
• PyTorch
• Keras
• Seaborn (This has saved countless hours of my life)
• Flask
• GitHub
• Perforce
• Overleaf/Latex

Current and Future Research Projects and Interests

My research interests lie at the center of AI, S&P, and HCI. I’m particularly interested in improving user privacy using AI, investigating privacy and ethics issues using HCI techniques, and better understanding issues with ML robustness and fairness. Below are some of the projects I’m currently planning and working on. My dream is to design and develop an autonomous and fully-working AGI (not necessary human-level or animal-level intelligence). I’d prefer if you don’t scoop these exact ideas but rather use them as inspiration for your own ideas/research. Either way, the design and execution is the hardest part.

Privacy

• AGI for automating dynamic privacy analysis and consistency with privacy policies.
• Large-scale privacy analysis of survey and crowdsourcing tools.
• Extracting 3rd party data flows from privacy policies and automating data requests.
• Quantifying and measuring (un)usability of privacy controls.
• Measuring the true carbon cost of surveillance capitalism.
• Conversational privacy in robots and voice assistants.

AGI

• Designing and implementing some sort of AGI using the CMC, DNNs, model-based RL, and symbolic reasoning.

Adversarial ML

• Data poisoning attacks on interest-based classifiers.
• Adversarial behaviors for recommendation algorithms and RL.

ML Fairness

• Fairness properties of adversarial NLP.
• Large language models and personalization/overfitting.

Tech Addiction

• Automated detection and censorship of toxicity and misinformation to reduce doomscrolling.
• Measuring effictiveness of warning labels for recommendations.