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 am very vaguely interested in ML’s applications in science/social science research.

(credit to xkcd, I did some small modification)

I have a bunch of hobbies. I like travel, sports, outdoors, and photography. Endurance sports such as hiking, cycling, or trekking in the backcountry are my favorites. I mainly do travel photography just as a way to record my life, but I am trying to get into other areas of photography 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 sometimes, 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, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and Hong Lou Meng by Cao Xueqin.