Wanru (Renee) Zhao

Hey, thanks for stopping by! 👋

I’m a postgraduate student in Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. I’m currently working on Federated Learning at the Cambridge Machine Learning Systems Lab (CaMLSys), supervised by Prof. Nic Lane, where I actively work on the open-source framework Flower. I’m also a member of Cambridge AI Safety Lab, working on AI Alignment and Interpretability.

My research targets the development of more decentralized AI by focusing on AI methods that are less centralized and more collaborative. The focus involves moving into the era of Large Language Models that are multilingual (ICLR 2024) and prioritize data quality (ICLR 2024 DPFM). I aim to develop collaborative solutions for foundation models that benefit the broader public, working on the following key aspects:

🔐 Privacy and security (MLSys 2023 SeT, ICLR 2024 workshop, UK Challenge)

🛡 Safety (FAccT 2023)

🚀 Efficiency (Protea@MobiCom 2022 FedEdge, Pollen@MobiUK 2023)

Prior to Cambridge, I was glad to be advised by Prof. Yongxin Tong and Prof. Xianglong Liu. I also spent wonderful time doing research at AWS AI Lab mentored by Dr. Minjie Wang and Prof. Zheng Zhang, where I worked on Deep Graph Library and its interpretability toolkits GNNLens2.

I’m open to collaborations in all forms and would love to explore any opportunities! Feel free to contact me by Email (wz341 [AT] cam.ac.uk or zhaowrenee [AT] gmail.com), Wechat, or Calendly.