Contact
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. In 2026 I founded Adherence, a startup building enterprise AI agents.
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're hiring multiple postdocs on AI safety, multi-agent systems, self-improvement and differential privacy — see the SpotAI page to apply.
Latest News (see all)
Publications by venue:
ICML ×4 🌟
ICLR ×4 🌟
USENIX ×3
NeurIPS ×2
IEEE S&P ×2
ACL ×2
CVPR ×1 🏆
ECCV ×1
EMNLP ×1
EACL ×1
Jul'26
🥇 I am a PI on a grant from the United Al-Saqer group on MedBoard: Privacy-preserving Multi-Agent AI for Healthcare, with Praneeth Vepakomma and Preslav Nakov.
Jun'26
🔥 SPQR, a benchmark for the safety alignment of text-to-image models under benign fine-tuning, was accepted at ECCV'26 (Datasets & Benchmarks).
May'26
I gave a talk on 'AI Safety: Alignment, Oversight and Deception' at the ADIA Lab & UGR Summer School in Granada, Spain.
Apr'26
🔥 Two papers accepted at ICML'26: Collaborative Threshold Watermarking and CoRe: Collaborative Reasoning via Cross Teaching.
Apr'26
🔥 Two papers accepted at ACL'26, one at the main conference and one at Findings.
Feb'26
I attended our US AI Forum in San Francisco, then traveled to Washington DC for a CRA career event.
Feb'26
I am a PI on a grant from TII (Technology Innovation Institute), together with Salem Lahlou, to research GFlowNets for fuzzing of agentic applications.
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 as a 🌟 Spotlight (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.