January 2026 Newsletter

January 2026

Research News

NPR Interviews FICS Faculty

FICS faculty member Sonja Schmer-Galunder was interviewed by NPR’s All Things Considered to discuss the Bill of Rights for Artificial Intelligence. In the interview, Dr. Schmer-Galunder provided an informed discussion of the policy implications and broader societal considerations around the use of AI. Her segment begins at 19:33. (listen here)

FICS at NeurIPS 2025: Rethinking Privacy in Deep Learning

FICS faculty member Dr.Vincent Bindschaedler and PhD student Wenxuan Bao recently presented their paper, “Deep Learning with Plausible Deniability,” at NeurIPS 2025, one of the world’s most prestigious academic conferences for AI and machine learning research. Their work advances the field of trustworthy machine learning by addressing fundamental challenges at the intersection of privacy-preserving learning, security, and model interpretability.

The research explores how deep learning systems can be designed to provide strong utility guarantees while offering plausible deniability for sensitive training data—moving beyond traditional privacy frameworks to mitigate inference and leakage risks. As Dr. Bindschaedler emphasizes, “We don’t want to design systems that may be highly intelligent without regard to how they process sensitive data.” (Read More)

Faculty Spotlight

FICS Welcomes New Faculty Members

We are pleased to welcome our newest faculty members (from L-R): Professor of Practice John Oakley, who joins us with more than 20 years of experience in mixed-signal architecture, Assistant Professor Yuanyuan Lei, whose research focuses on large language models (LLMs), natural language processing, and information security; Assistant Professor Dung Tran, whose expertise includes specification and modeling languages, formal verification, and human–robot interaction.

Graduate Spotlight

Congratulations to our Fall PhD graduates. On behalf of everyone at FICS, we commend you for your outstanding academic achievements and dedication to research. We are pleased to share that, following their work at FICS Research, Shams Tarek has accepted a position at NVIDIA as a Senior Formal Verification Engineer, and Zahin Ibnat has accepted a position at Caspia Technologies as a Senior Applications Engineer. We wish all of our graduates continued success and look forward to the contributions they will make in their future endeavors.