Texas ECE postdoctoral fellow Junyuan Hong has been named a Best Paper Award Finalist from the 50th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB2024) which took place in Guangzhou, China from August 26-30, 2024. The award was for the paper "LLM-PBE: Assessing Data Privacy in Large Language Models." It was co-authored with Junyuan's advisor, Prof. Atlas Wang, as well as colleagues from The University of California, Berkeley, The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, The University of Chicago and the National University of Singapore.

VLDB is a premier annual international forum for data management, scalable data science and database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users. It covers issues in data management, database architectures, graph data management, data privacy and security, data mining, machine learning, AI and database systems research.

Earlier this year, Junyuan was named an MLCommons Rising Star for 2024.

Junyuan Hong is a postdoctoral fellow hosted by Prof. Atlas Wang in the Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML) in Texas ECE. His research interests lie at the intersection of responsible artificial intelligence (AI) and real-world applications, particularly in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. He is deeply motivated by the challenge of imbuing responsible AI systems with privacy, robustness, security, and ethics, to ensure their functionality is reliable and their operations respect individual rights and societal norms.