Nicolas Papernot

Nicolas Papernot
Photo by Matthew Tierney.

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Computer Science, and the Faculty of Law. I am also a faculty member at the Vector Institute where I hold a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute.

My research interests are at the intersection of security, privacy, and machine learning. If you would like to learn more about my research, I recommend reading the blog posts I co-authored on cleverhans.io, for example about proof-of-learning, collaborative learning beyond federation, dataset inference, machine unlearning, differentially private ML, or adversarial examples.

I was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computer Science in 2022, a Member of the Royal Society of Canada College in 2023, and an AI2050 Early Career Fellow By Schmidt Sciences in 2024. I received the McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction in 2024 and the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Early-Career Researcher Award in 2024.

My research has been cited in the press, including the BBC, New York Times, Popular Science, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and Wired. I co-founded and served as a Program Committee Co-Chair of the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML) in 2023 and 2024. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, working with Prof. Patrick McDaniel and supported by a Google PhD Fellowship. Upon graduating, I joined Google Brain for a year; I continue to spend time at Google DeepMind.

Email: [email protected]

Office: Pratt 484E and SRIC (the Vector Institute lobby is on the 11th floor)

Mail/Packages: 10 King's College Road, Room SFB540, Toronto, ON M5S 3G4, Canada

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Recent & selected older publications

A complete list of publications is available in my CV.

2025
2024
2023
2022 & earlier

Research group

Current students and postdocs
Past students and postdocs
Information for prospective graduate students and postdocs

Research Talks

Upcoming

Here is a list of talks I will be giving. Feel free to reach out if you will be attending one of these events and would like to meet.

Past Recorded Talks

These video resources are a good overview of my research interests.

Machine Unlearning
Randomization in Trustworthy ML
Trustworthy ML
Deepfakes
Lecture on ML security and privacy
Privacy-preserving ML
Adversarial examples

Blog Posts

Here is a list of blog posts discussing some of the research questions I'm interested in:

Teaching