NEWS

I have joined CoreLogic as a Senior Machine Learning Scientist, working on GenAI projects. (10/2024)

EDUCATION

UC San Diego, PhD, Computer Engineering (advised by Prof. Farinaz Koushanfar) (Aug. 2024)
San Diego State University, MSEE, Computer Engineering (Dec. 2019)
Northeastern University (CN), BSEE, Computer Engineering (May 2017)

EXPERIENCE

Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Check-It Analytics, San Diego, CA (Aug. 2023 - Current)

Founded and led the development of an AI-driven financial information platform to address the time-consuming issue of collecting and analyzing financial news.
Used RAG for LLMs to streamline financial processes and provide customers with suggested questions and answers.
Achieved up to 80% time savings compared to traditional financial platforms.

Research Intern, Arm, Austin, TX (June 2023 - Sep. 2023)

Address the challenge of large data size without compromising efficiency.
Developed a data distillation algorithm.
Reduced data size to at least 1/10,000 and improved ML model performance by at least 50%.

Research Intern, Arm, Austin, TX (May 2022 - Aug. 2022)

Led a SoC trace data distillation project to improve data processing efficiency.
Developed a novel vulnerability detection algorithm using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs).
Reduced data processing times by 50%.

Graduate Student Researcher, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA (Dec. 2019 - Current)

Developed innovative techniques for identifying compromised artificial intelligence models and enhancing security.
Played a leading role in a team that achieved 2nd place among 16 competitors in a notable AI security challenge

Deacon Board Member, Fresh Wind Chinese Church of San Diego, San Diego, CA (Aug. 2019 - Current)

Led the outreach department to organize large-scale social events
Successfully organized events for up to 120 people

HIGHLIGHTED PUBLICATION & PATENTS

(Trustworthy ML) Z. Ghodsi*, M, Javaheripi*, N. Sheyban*, X. Zhang*, K, Huang, & F. Koushanfar, (2023).zPROBE: Zero Peek Robustness Checks for Federated Learning, (ICCV23)
[PATENT: zPROBE: Zero Peek Robustness Checks for Federated Learning] 2022 (Serial No.63/496,157.)
(Trustworthy ML) Z. Ghodsi*, M, Javaheripi*, N. Sheybani*,X. Zhang*, K, Huang, & F. Koushanfar, (2022).zPROBE: Zero Peek Robustness Checks for Federated Learning, (NeurIPS’22-TSRML) [Outstanding paper award]
(Trustworthy ML) X. Zhang, M. Samragh, S. Hussain, K. Huang, & F. Koushanfar. Scalable Binary Neural Network applications in Oblivious Inference, (ACM TECS)
(Watermarking) P. Neekhara, S. Hussain, X. Zhang, K. Huang, J. McAuley, F. Koushanfar, (2023).zPROBE: FaceSigns: Semi-Fragile Neural Watermarks for Media Authentication and Countering Deepfakes (TOMM-2024, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications)
(Trustworthy ML) Z. Ghodsi*, M, Javaheripi*, N. Sheyban*, X. Zhang*, K, Huang, & F. Koushanfar, (2023).zPROBE: Zero Peek Robustness Checks for Federated Learning, (ICCV23)
(Trustworthy ML) M. Samragh, S. Hussain, X. Zhang, K. Huang, & F. Koushanfar (2021). On the Application of Binary Neural Networks in Oblivious Inference. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 4630-4639)
(Watermarking) S. Hussain, N, Sheybani, P. Neekhara, X. Zhang, J. Duarte, F. Koushanfar (2022) FastStamp: Accelerating Neural Steganography and Digital Watermarking of Images on FPGAs. ICCAD’22)
(Crypto) N. Sheybani, X. Zhang, S. U. Hussain, F. Koushanfar. SenseHash: Computing on Sensor Values Mystified at the Origin. IEEE (TETC-2021)
(Hardware Security) H. Chen, X. Zhang, K. Huang, F. Koushanfar. “AdaTest: Reinforcement Learning and Adaptive Sampling for On-chip Hardware Trojan Detection,” ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) 2022.
[PATENT: FACESIGNS: SEMI-FRAGILE NEURAL WATERMARKS FOR MEDIA AUTHENTICATION AND COUNTERING DEEPFAKES] 2022 (Serial No.63/323,470.)
(Hardware Security) K. Huang, M.T.H. Anik, X. Zhang, and N. Karimi, “Real-Time IC Aging Prediction via On-Chip Sensors.” 2021 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI). IEEE, 2021
(Hardware Security) D. Ma, X. Zhang, et al. “DEVoT: Dynamic Delay Modeling of Functional Units under Voltage and Temperature Variations.” IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (2021).
(Hardware Security) K. Huang, X. Zhang, and N. Karimi, “Real-time prediction for IC aging based on machine learning. “IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement (TIM), vol. 68, no. 12, pp. 4756-4764, 2019.
[PATENT: Peasants Joy precisely pushes guiding device], CN205754440U, 2016
[PATENT: Bicycle lock based on bluetooth], CN205621091U , 2016
[PATENT: Portablely lead blind waistband] CN204766395U, 2015

HIGHLIGHTED PROJECTS

[Project: Secure Retrieval-Augmented Generation on LLMs (May. 2024 - Current)]

Implemented attack defense using a novel objective function combining adversarial loss, BERTScore, and harmful loss.
Developed a robust RAG system for LLMs to counter universal attacks.
Successfully prevented over 90% of state-of-the-art poisoning attacks and jailbreaking attacks on RAG-based LLMs.

[Project: Transformer-based sequence classification (Dec. 2022 - Aug. 2024)]

Addressed the need to detect malicious activities on industry SoC log data.
Developed transformer-based machine learning algorithms to classify hardware intrusion attacks.
Achieved a 16% accuracy improvement in hardware intrusion detection.

Project: DNN-based media authentication and acceleration (Feb.. 2023 - Aug. 2023 ) —

Address the growing threat of deepfakes and manipulated media, which pose significant challenges due to advances in realistic image and video synthesis techniques.
Built a novel AI-based media authentication system using a deep learning-based semi-fragile watermarking technique.
Achieved up to a 54% accuracy improvement with an AUC score of 0.996.

Project: Quantization of Deep Neural Network (Feb. 2021 - May. 2021)

Enabled oblivious inference in BNN.
Explored the application of BNN in oblivious inference. Devised lightweight cryptographic protocols tailored to BNNs.
Achieved 2x faster inference and up to 11x faster inference for binary networks.

Project: Optimization and Acceleration of Deep Learning on Various Hardware Platforms (2021)

Project: TrojAI

Professional Services:

Reviewer:

ACM Transactions on TECS
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
The journal of supercomputing
International Journal of Machine learning and Cybernetics
Transactions on Machine Learning Research
IEEE ICPR
Transactions on Information Forensics & Security

Award

Outstanding paper award (NeurlPS 2022 TSRML) DAC Young Fellow (58th Design Automation Conference) Nov. 2021 Honorable Mention of Mathematical Contest in Modeling Oct. 2016