Nils Lukas portrait

Contact

Bio

2024–nowAsst. ProfMBZUAI
2019–24PhDU. Waterloo
2016–18MScRWTH-Aachen

Guten Tag, I’m Nils 👋. I’m an Assistant Professor of Machine Learning at MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi leading the Secure, Private, Open and Trustworthy SPOT Lab logo AI lab. I have received Waterloo's 2024 Alumni Gold medal and my PhD thesis received the Top Mathematics Doctoral Prize.

My research focuses on (i) secure, (ii) private and (iii) strategic machine learning. I am interested in researching methods to make large ML system accessible to millions of users in a responsible way. This includes topics such as content watermarking, privacy-preserving inference, AI safety & security and developing conversational agents with social intelligence.

> We have open positions in the SPOT Lab logo for talented students! Please apply via e-mail.
> We have three open Postdoc position. Apply here. All positions have been filled!

Latest News (see all)

May'25 🔥 Two papers accepted at ICML’25, one with a spotlight award (top 2.6%).
May'25 I travelled to the US AI Forum by MBZUAI in San Francisco.
Oct'24 🥇First place in GITEX Cybersecurity hackathon with 10.8k USD price money. Congrats to my MSc student Tameem Bakr and the team.
Aug'24 I joined MBZUAI as an Assistant Professor of Machine Learning.
Jun'24 🔥 Two papers accepted at USENIX’24 on Private Set Intersection& secure DNN inference.
Apr'24 🥇Received the Mathematics Doctoral Prize and the Waterloo Alumni Gold Medal.
Jan'24 🔥 Two papers accepted at ICLR’24 (Vienna) on adaptive image‑watermark attacks & universal backdoors.
Dec'23 Gave a research talk at Meta on privacy of personal information in fine‑tuned LLMs.
Oct'23 Talk at UCBerkeley & 🥇Best Poster Award at Cheriton Symposium (Waterloo).
Oct'23 🏆 Distinguished Contribution Award at Microsoft MLADS for our IEEE S&P’23 paper.
Jun'23 Research talks at Google & MongoDB; IEEE S&P’23 paper featured on the Microsoft Research Focus blog.
May'23 🔥 Paper on learnable watermarks for image generators accepted at USENIX’23 Security (Anaheim).
Apr'23 🔥 Paper on PII leakage in language models accepted at IEEE S&P’23 (San Francisco).
May'22 Started research internship at Microsoft Research with Shruti Tople & Lukas Wutschitz.
Feb'22 🏆 Awarded the David R. Cheriton Scholarship for outstanding academic achievements.