Joshua Zhao, PhD student in DCSL, won the Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship from Purdue. The goal of the fellowship is to support for outstanding PhD candidates to focus on finishing their dissertation. It provides salary, tuition remission, medical insurance premium contribution, and coverage of most fees. It is administered by the Graduate School.
Josh has worked as part of our Army Research Lab Institute called Assured Autonomy Innovation Institute (A2I2). He has blazed a new direction in secure and private Machine Learning (ML), a technology called Federated Learning, and more broadly, Distributed ML. He has published his work at the top ML venues (CVPR, twice) and the top security venues (S&P, AsiaCCS).
When joining Purdue as a PhD student, Josh was awarded the prestigious Purdue Andrews Fellowship, a highly selective fellowship meant for attracting top students to our PhD program — typically 2-4 are given among the approximately 2500 ECE graduate applicants.