McGill University
Dr. Benjamin Fung, PEng, PhD is a Canada Research Chair in Data Mining for Cybersecurity, a Full Professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University and a Co-curator of Cybersecurity in the World Economic Forum (WEF). His research focuses on developing novel data mining and machine learning solutions to tackle different challenges in privacy, cybersecurity, healthcare and transportation systems. Dr. Fung is interested in preserving privacy in cases where large amounts of sensitive data, such as patient records, need to be released for data mining to a third party. Anonymization algorithms transform data so that outsiders can no longer obtain sensitive data about patients but can still extract useful information from the dataset. Collaborating with the scientists at Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), his research team developed the first scalable AI-powered search engine to help defence scientists better understand the inner workings of software binaries, including malware.
Dr. Fung received his BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University. He has over 130 referred publications, with more than 10,000 citations, that span the research areas of data mining, machine learning, privacy protection, cybersecurity, and building engineering. His data mining works in crime investigation and authorship analysis have been reported by media worldwide. Dr. Fung is a licensed professional engineer in software engineering and an Associate Academic Member of MILA. He also serves as Associate Editors for IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and Elsevier Sustainable Cities and Society (SCS).