Nicolas Papernot is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He is also a faculty member at the Vector Institute where he holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute. His research interests span the security and privacy of machine learning. Nicolas is a Connaught Researcher and was previously a Google PhD Fellow. His work on differentially private machine learning received a best paper award at ICLR 2017. He is an associate chair of IEEE S&P (Oakland) and an area chair of NeurIPS. He earned his Ph.D. at the Pennsylvania State University, working with Prof. Patrick McDaniel. Upon graduating, he spent a year as a research scientist at Google Brain where he still spends some of his time.

Professor Papernot’s research interests span the areas of computer security, privacy, and machine learning. Together with his collaborators, he demonstrated the first practical black-box attacks against deep neural networks. His work on differential privacy for machine learning, involving the development of a family of algorithms called Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles (PATE), has made it easy for machine learning researchers to contribute to differential privacy research. He also co-authored with Ian Goodfellow an open-source library called CleverHans, now widely adopted in the technical community to benchmark machine learning in adversarial settings.