Zhigang's Homepage
Short Bio
Dr Zhigang Lu is a Senior Lecturer of Computer Science with the School of Computer, Data and Mathematical Sciences, Western Sydney University (WSU) and a member of WSU Artificial Intelligence Research Group (AIRG). He also served as an Adjunct Lecturer with James Cook University since August 2024.
His academic career began as a continuing Lecturer of Information Technology at James Cook University from January 2023, where he was recognised as one of the best lecturers based on student evaluations. He also played a leading role in developing a new cyber security major to refresh the Master of Information Technology program, which is set to launch in Trimester 1, 2025.
Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub, Macquarie University from Jan 2020, working closely with Prof Dali Kaafar, Dr Hassan Asghar and Dr Dinusha Vatsalan. He was funded by the Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub, in partnership with the Defence Science & Technology Group and Data61-CSIRO, through the Next Generation Technologies Fund.
He obtained his PhD (supervised by Prof Hong Shen and Prof Michael Sheng, funded by the Adelaide Graduate Research Scholarship) and MPhil (supervised by Prof Hong Shen and A/Prof Nickolas Falkner) degrees from the University of Adelaide (now Adelaide University) and BEng degree from Xidian University, all in computer science. He was one of the two recipients of the University Master by Research Medal in 2015. He won a First Award in the National Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modelling (Shaanxi Division) in 2009 and a Third Award in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC Intramural Competition) in 2008.
He also worked as a Data Scientist in the industry for three months in early 2022.
Research Interests
Differential privacy, Secure multi-party computation, Information theory, Adversarial machine learning, Transfer learning, Robust AI.
News
Oct, 2024. Our paper, ‘Practical, Private Assurance of the Value of Collaboration via Fully Homomorphic Encryption’ was accepted by the 25th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS-2025, CORE A).
Sep, 2024. Our paper, ‘GAP-Diff: Protecting JPEG-Compressed Images from Diffusion-based Facial Customization’, was accepted by the 32nd Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS-2025, a Big-4 cybersecurity conference). Only 3% papers were accepted directly this year.
Aug, 2024. I joined Western Sydney University as a Senior Lecturer and was granted a $10,000 research start-up package. I was also appointed as an Adjunct Lecturer with James Cook University.
May, 2024. The subject, Network Security, I coordinated and lectured at JCU, received 89% satisfaction from JCU internal students evaluation.
May, 2024. The subject, Internet Foundamentals, I coordinated and lectured at JCU, received 84% satisfaction from JCU students evaluation.
Apr, 2024. Welcome PhD students Yanan Cai and Zhongrui Zhao to join the Discpline of IT.
Feb, 2024. Our paper, ‘dp-promise: Differentially Private Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Image Synthesis’, was accepted by the 33rd Usenix Security Symposum (Usenix Security-2024, a Big-4 cybersecurity conference).
Feb, 2024. Congratulations to Zhongrui on been awarded a JCU Postgraduate Research Scholarship to support his PhD journey.
Feb, 2024. Welcome PhD student Yang Chen to join the Discipline of IT.
Jan, 2024. The subject, Cloud Computing, I coordinated and lectured at JCU, received 90% satisfaction from JCU internal students evaluation.
Jan, 2024. I was interviewed by Risa Utama from 7NEWS Townsville regarding online safety and scams.
Jan, 2024. Welcome Yuefang Lian (PhD student at Beijing University of Technology) to visit my team at JCU from Jan-2024 to Jan-2025.
Jan, 2024. Welcome A/Prof Cong Gao (Xi'an University of Posts and Telecommunications) to visit my team at JCU from Jan-2024 to Jan-2025.
Dec, 2023. Our paper, ‘Efficient Constrained k-Center Clustering with Background Knowledge’, was accepted by the 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2024, a Top-2 AI conference).
Nov, 2023. Congratulations to Yanan on been awarded a sponsorship of tuition fees from JCU for her PhD program.
Nov, 2023. I gave guest lectures for Introduction to Data Science and Machine Learning and Database Modelling at Xi'an University of Technology for three weeks.
Nov, 2023. I represented the Discipline of IT to give a talk about Vulnerability and Defence in Machine Learning at the JCU-XUT joint program annual conference.
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