Ben Zhao

Ben Zhao is Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at University of Chicago, specializing in cybersecurity, machine learning, and privacy in online networks. Known for his influential research in adversarial machine learning and large-scale social network analysis to fight technological overreach, Zhao has published widely and received multiple awards for his work, including honors from the National Science Foundation and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation's NSF CAREER award, MIT Technology Review's TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35), USENIX Internet Defense Prize, ComputerWorld Magazine's Top 40 Technology Innovators award, IEEE ITC Early Career Award, and Faculty awards from Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Additionally, he landed a spot on the TIME100 AI list in 2024 for his and his team's work on the invention of Nightshade. Zhao's work has been covered by many media outlets including The New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC, BBC, MIT Tech Review, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and New Scientist.

Zhao completed his PhD at University of California, Berkeley and his BS from Yale University.

Zhao's current research focuses on mitigating the harms of misused AI. He has published over 190 articles in areas of security and privacy, machine learning, networking, and HCI. He served as TPC (co-)chair for the World Wide Web conference (WWW 2016) and ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2018), and on the Steering Committee of IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML).