Seminar: Trustworthy AI: Some Recent Work at CNSR Lab
Wenjing Lou
W.C. English Endowed Professor of Computer Science
Virginia Tech
Friday, October 30, 2026
2:30 - 3:30p.m.
3100 Torgersen Hall
Abstract
In recent years, one of my lab’s research focuses has been the security and privacy of AI systems. In this talk, I will provide an overview of our research on trustworthy AI, highlight several recent projects, and then take a closer look at two privacy-related topics.
The first is model inversion, also known as data reconstruction attacks, which aim to recover participants’ private data from model updates in federated learning. I will discuss state-of-the-art reconstruction attacks, their broader privacy implications, and the limitations of traditional privacy-enhancing technologies in defending against these attacks.
The second topic is data minimization for AI agents. I will introduce a task-aware approach that uses a trusted local sanitizer to identify and minimize sensitive information on the client device before observations are shared with an AI agent, helping protect user privacy while preserving the information needed for effective task execution.
Biography
Wenjing Lou is the W. C. English Endowed Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM. Her research interests cover many topics in the cybersecurity field, with her current research focusing on security and privacy problems in wireless networks, blockchain, trustworthy machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Prof. Lou is a highly cited researcher by the Web of Science Group. She received the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Research Excellence in 2018, the highest university-level faculty research award. She received the IEEE INFOCOM Test-of-Time paper award in 2020 and IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award in 2025. She is the TPC chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2019 and ACM WiSec 2020. She was the founding steering committee chair for IEEE CNS conference from 2013 to 2020. She is currently the chair of IEEE INFOCOM steering committee and a member of IEEE CNS steering committee. She served as a program director at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2014 to 2017.