Pavel Laskov

Timeline

1. By 2001

   Moscow to a Delaware PhD

   Born in Moscow in 1971, he earns a first degree in computer and system engineering at the Moscow Institute of Radio, Electronics and Automation. He then takes a master's degree and, in 2001, a PhD in computer science at the University of Delaware.

2. 2001–2009

   Fraunhofer FIRST in Berlin

   From 2001, he works at the Fraunhofer Institute FIRST in Berlin as a project and research group head in the Intelligent Data Analysis department. He leads MIND (Machine Learning for Intrusion Detection), a project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research that uses machine learning to find attacks in Internet traffic.

3. 2009–2014

   Heisenberg Fellow at Tübingen

   In April 2009, the German Research Foundation awards him a Heisenberg fellowship, which lets him work at the Wilhelm Schickard Institute for Computer Science at the University of Tübingen. He is a Heisenberg Fellow at Tübingen until 2014.

4. 2012

   Poisoning attacks on SVMs

   In 2012, he coauthors "Poisoning Attacks against Support Vector Machines" with Battista Biggio and Blaine Nelson, a paper in the proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning. It describes attacks that inject specially crafted training data to raise an SVM's test error, built on a gradient ascent strategy.

5. 2014–2018

   Threat analysis at Huawei

   From 2014 to 2018, he is Principal Engineer at the Huawei European Research Center in Munich, where he heads the "Big Data Threat Analysis" team.

6. 2018

   Hilti Chair in Liechtenstein

   In 2018, he becomes a Full Professor at the University of Liechtenstein and head of its Hilti Chair of Data and Application Security.

7. 2022

   ICML Test of Time Award

   In 2022, ICML gives its Test of Time Award to "Poisoning Attacks against Support Vector Machines," his paper with Battista Biggio and Blaine Nelson. The awards committee calls it one of the earliest and most impactful papers on poisoning attacks.

8. As of October 2026

   AI security in Liechtenstein

   He is Professor for Data and Application Security at the University of Liechtenstein and Academic Director of the MSc Information Systems at the Liechtenstein Business School, and his chair investigates attacks against AI systems and their countermeasures. In November 2025, he co-organizes Dagstuhl Seminar 25461 on the security and privacy of large language models.