Bio
| 2024–now | Asst. Prof | MBZUAI |
| 2019–24 | PhD | U. Waterloo |
| 2016–18 | MSc | RWTH-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 
AI lab.
I have received Waterloo's 2024 Alumni Gold medal, my PhD thesis received the Top Mathematics Doctoral Prize and in 2025 I won an Amazon Research Award.
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.
I have taught the following courses at MBZUAI
- S'26: ML8509 – Collaborative ML (w/ S. Horvath)
- F'25: ML8502 – ML Security
- S'25: ML807 – Federated Learning (w/ P. Vepakomma)
- F'24: ML818 – Trustworthy ML (w/ K. Nandakumar, P. Vepakomma)
> We have open positions in the for talented students! Please apply via e-mail (my personal email or spot.ai@mbzuai.ac.ae).
for talented students! Please apply via e-mail (my personal email or spot.ai@mbzuai.ac.ae).
Latest News (see all)
Feb'26
I attended our US AI Forum in San Francisco, then traveled to Washington DC for a CRA career event.
Dec'25
🥇I received an Amazon Research Award
Sept'25
I was invited by Hady Elsahar to give a remote talk to the watermarking team at Meta (FAIR) in Paris on 'Adaptively Robust and Forgery-Resistant Watermarking'.
Sept'25
I am a co-PI on a grant from the United Al-Saqer group to research privacy-preserving brain computer interfaces, with Abdulrahman Mahmoud and Elizabeth Churchill.
Sept'25
🔥 One paper on mask image watermarking accepted at NeurIPS’25.
Aug'25
I am a PI on a grant with Etihad Airways to research and develop conversational booking agents.
Aug'25
🔥 One paper on patching Speech Language Models accepted at EMNLP’25 (main).
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.
Dec'24
🥇First place in the NeurIPS'24 watermark removal challenge with 4.4k USD price money. Congrats to Fahad Shamsha and the team. (link)
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.