PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Reza Shokri

Also known as rzshokri

Reza Shokri is a computer scientist whose research on data privacy and trustworthy machine learning showed how models can leak information about their training data. He completed a PhD at EPFL in 2013, wrote Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning with Vitaly Shmatikov in 2015, and received the 2018 Caspar Bowden Award for the paper Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models. His research also produced Privacy Meter, an open-source tool for evaluating privacy risks in machine learning, and he received the IEEE Security and Privacy Test-of-Time Award in 2021, the Asian Young Scientist Fellowship in 2023 and the ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award in 2025. He is a Dean's Chair Associate Professor of computer science at the National University of Singapore and a research scientist at Google Research.

Timeline

  1. 2011–2013

    Location privacy at EPFL

    In 2011, he and co-authors George Theodorakopoulos, Jean-Yves Le Boudec and Jean-Pierre Hubaux first present Quantifying Location Privacy at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. He completes his PhD at EPFL in 2013 with a thesis titled Quantifying and Protecting Location Privacy.

  2. 2015

    Privacy-preserving deep learning

    In 2015, he and Vitaly Shmatikov publish Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning, a method that lets several parties train a model together by exchanging only privacy-preserving, norm-bounded model updates while their raw data stays with them. He calls the idea "sharing without sharing".

  3. 2016–2018

    Membership inference attacks

    In October 2016, he posts Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models on arXiv with Marco Stronati, Congzheng Song and Vitaly Shmatikov. The paper shows how to determine whether a data record was in a model's training dataset given black-box access to the model, and tests the attack on machine learning as a service platforms from Google and Amazon. In July 2018, as an assistant professor of computer science at NUS, he receives the Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies for this work.

  4. 2020–2021

    IEEE S&P Test-of-Time Award

    In December 2020, the Private AI Collaborative Research Institute selects him to research heterogeneous decentralised learning. In 2021, he and his co-authors win the IEEE Security and Privacy Test-of-Time Award for Quantifying Location Privacy, which presents a formal framework for quantifying the privacy risks of sharing location data.

  5. 2023

    Asian Young Scientist Fellowship

    As an NUS Presidential Young Professor, he is one of the inaugural recipients of the Asian Young Scientist Fellowship in 2023, and his work on fairness in machine learning wins the Best Paper Award at ACM FAccT 2023. His research also produces Privacy Meter, an open-source tool for evaluating privacy risks in machine learning.

  6. 2023–2025

    Privacy of language models

    He spends 2023–2024 as a visiting research professor at Microsoft. His papers on language models include Can LLMs Keep a Secret?, an ICLR 2024 paper written with Niloofar Mireshghallah, Yejin Choi and others, and The Canary's Echo, a 2025 paper on auditing privacy risks of LLM-generated synthetic text.

  7. 2025

    ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award

    In 2025, he wins the ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award for Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning, the 2015 paper he wrote with Vitaly Shmatikov. The award recognises a paper that has inspired advances in federated learning and privacy standards across healthcare, finance and mobile applications.

  8. As of October 2026

    Google Research and NUS

    He is a research scientist at Google Research and a Dean's Chair Associate Professor of computer science at NUS, where his research focuses on data privacy and trustworthy machine learning.

Career

  1. NowNational University of SingaporeAssistant Professor of Computer Science
  2. NowGoogle ResearchResearch Scientist
  3. 2023–2024MicrosoftVisiting Research Professor
  4. From 2020Private AI Collaborative Research InstituteResearcher

Education

  1. 2013EPFLPhD

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Reza Shokri. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Reza Shokri yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Reza SHOKRI comp.nus.edu.sg. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Dr. Reza Shokri and co-authors win IEEE Security and Privacy Test-of-Time Award - NUS Computing comp.nus.edu.sg. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Professor Reza Shokri Honoured with ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award for Pioneering Privacy-Preserving Modern AI - NUS Computing comp.nus.edu.sg. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. [1610.05820] Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Asst Prof Reza Shokri recognised for privacy enhancing research news.nus.edu.sg. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. NUS Presidential Young Professor of Computer Science Reza Shokri joins Private AI Collaborative Research Institute - NUS Computing comp.nus.edu.sg. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. National University of Singapore's Professor Reza Shokri Receives Prestigious Asian Young Scientist Fellowship - NUS Computing comp.nus.edu.sg. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. Tracing Data in AI: Auditing Data Privacy with Membership Inference | trustml.ubc.ca trustml.ubc.ca. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. Reza Shokri | alphaXiv alphaxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. Reza SHOKRI - NUS Computing comp.nus.edu.sg. Checked 22 October 2026.