About

I’m Yiwei (yee-way) Fu (foo), a first-year CS PhD student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Previously, I had a master’s degree in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University. Before that, I graduated from University of Michigan majoring in Honors Mathematics and Computer Science (GO BLUE!!!).

My research interest is in the privacy, safety, and security of machine learning, especially their connections with each other. I’m broadly interested in differential privacy, safety, and alignment of generative models with their information theoretic implications, and efficient and secure machine learning systems.

I do love to know a bit of everything, like ML’s applications in science/social science research. I did Chemistry Olympiad during high school (although without any remarkable achievements), and am interested in science disciplines in general besides math and CS (which I major in). Pure theoretical stuff are absolutely cool, but I like applied things just as much.

(credit to xkcd, I did some small modification)

I have a bunch of hobbies. I like travel, road trips, outdoors, and photography. I mainly take photos when I travel but am actively trying to use photography as a way to express my take on everyday life as well.

Apart from going outside, I also love to cook, which is a habit I picked up during covid days. Food is the universal love language and I find a lot of commonalities among various cultures through food.

I enjoy reading, although I must admit I have not read much in recent years. Some of my favorite books are Blindness by José Saramango, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Pictures of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and Hong Lou Meng by Cao Xueqin.