title: Hao Cui @ UCI

Hao Cui (崔灏)

Personal Page: cvhc.cc

Email: cuih7@uci.edu / cuihao.leo@gmail.com

GitHub: @cuihaoleo

I am a Ph.D. student in the Networked Systems program at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). I am a member of the UCI Networking Group and ProperData Center. My advisor is Prof. Athina Markopoulou.

I am doing research in the area of privacy enhancing technologies, with a focus on auditing the privacy policies using natural language processing (NLP) technologies. I also have done research in the areas of multimedia security and machine learning security.

Eᴅᴜᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ

University of California, Irvine (2020-today)

• Ph.D. student in Networked Systems (Expected Graduation: Jul. 2024)

University of Science and Technology of China (2017-2020)

• M.Eng. in Electronics and Communication Engineering (GPA: 3.18/4.30)

University of Science and Technology of China (2013-2017)

• B.Sci. in Geophysics (GPA: 3.47/4.30)
• B.Eng. in Computer Science and Technology (GPA: 3.71/4.30)

Aᴡᴀʀᴅs

• UCI EECS Department Fellowship (Sep. 2020 - Feb. 2021)
• Kaggle Deepfake Detection Challenge, 2nd place (Jun. 2020)
  • Team \WM/: Hanqing Zhao, Hao Cui, Weibo Zhou
  • Leaderboard | Code | Official Blog | News (Chinese)
• IJCAI-19 Alibaba Adversarial AI Challenge, 1st place in defense track (Aug. 2019)
  • 1st/4th/2nd in defense/targeted/non-targeted attack track, respectively
  • Team RNG: Jiayang Liu, Hao Cui, Xiaoyi Dong
  • Leaderboard| News 1 (Chinese) | News 2 (Chinese)
• 11th Competition of Physical Research Experiment of USTC, Special Prize (Dec. 2015)
  • Leaderboard | Code
• China National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces, 1st prize / 4th place in Henan division (Oct. 2010)

Exᴘᴇʀɪᴇɴᴄᴇ

Graduate Student Researcher (2020-Today)

@ UCI Networking Group & ProperData Center / Advisor: Prof. Athina Markopoulou

• Explore NLP (natural language processing) techniques for automated privacy policy analysis.
• Conducted measurements of flow-to-policy consistency among apps on Oculus VR handsets.

Machine Learning Engineer Intern (Summer 2021)

@ Syntiant Corp., Irvine, CA / Manager: Dr. Sean McGregor

• Developed tools to measure biases in voice recognition models.

Research Assistant (2017-2020)

@ CAS Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Space Information, USTC / Advisor: Prof. Weiming Zhang

• Research #1: multimedia security
  • Proposed UnseenCode, an invisible on-screen barcode scheme for covert screen-camera communication.
  • Developed novel image watermarking methods against screen shooting.
• Research #2: machine learning security
  • DeepFake detection: Developed video classifiers to identify deep-learning forged videos.
  • Adversarial attack: Proposed an hybrid defense scheme to mitigate the attacks on CNN image clasifiers.
• Worked part-time as the Server Administrator: Built and managed the GPU cluster of Prof. Weiming Zhang's research group.

Teaching Assistant (Fall 2016, Fall 2017)

@ USTC, for Computer Programming A courses

President (2015-2016), CTO & Vice President (2014-2015)

@ USTC Linux User Group

• We proundly provide online services to Linux users on campus and in China, for example:
  • USTC open-source software mirrors
  • simple-pxe: USTC netboot system
  • liimstrap: generating OS images for USTC library kiosks

Pᴜʙʟɪᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴs

Journals & Conferences:

1. R. Trimananda, H. Le, H. Cui, J. T. Ho, A. Shuba and A. Markopoulou, “OVRseen: Auditing Network Traffic and Privacy Policies in Oculus VR,” in Proc. of USENIX Security Symposium 2022, Boston, USA, Aug. 2022.
   • Project Page | Paper (USENIX) | Paper (arXiv)
2. H. Bian, H. Cui, K. Liu, Z. Hang, D. Chen, W. Zhou, W. Zhang, and N. Yu, “CDAE: Color Decomposition-based Adversarial Examples for Screen Devices,” in Information Sciences, 2021.
3. J. Zhang, D. Chen, J. Liao, H. Fang, W. Zhang, W. Zhou, H. Cui, and N. Yu, “Model Watermarking for Image Processing Networks,” in Proc. of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 34(7), New York, USA, Feb. 2020.
4. H. Fang, W. Zhang, Z. Ma, H. Zhou, S. Sun, H. Cui, and N. Yu, “A Camera Shooting Resilient Watermarking Scheme for Underpainting Documents,” in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Vol. 30(11), Nov. 2020.
5. H. Cui, H. Bian, W. Zhang, and N. Yu, “UnseenCode: Invisible On-screen Barcode with Image-based Extraction,” in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM 2019, Paris, France, Apr. 2019.
   • Paper | Demo Abstract | Code: Android, Desktop
6. H. Fang, W. Zhang, H. Zhou, H. Cui, and N. Yu, “Screen-Shooting Resilient Watermarking,” in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Vol. 14(6), Jun. 2019.
7. H. Cui, and X. Zha “Parallel Image Registration Implementations for GMTSAR Package,” in Seismological Research Letters, Vol. 89(3), Feb. 2018.
   • Paper | Code

Thesis:

1. M.Eng. in Electronics and Communication Engineering: Color-Decomposition based Screen-Shooting Resilient Watermarking (2020)
2. B.Sci. in Geophysics: Design and implementation of multi-threaded parallel InSAR processing program (2017)
   • LaTeX source | Code
3. B.Eng. in Computer Science and Technology: Designing GPGPU parallel image-processing algorithms with OpenCL framework on mobile devices (2017)
   • PDF | Code

Sᴋɪʟʟs

• Language
  • English: GRE General (AW4.0/V160/Q169); TOEFL (102: R30/L28/S21/W23)
  • Japanese: JLPT N2
• Programming
  • Proficient: Python, C/C++, UNIX shell
  • Basic knowledge: Java, Kotlin, Javascript
  • Platforms: Linux, Android, Adruino; OpenCV, PyTorch, Tensorflow; OpenCL, CUDA