Yaxing Yao is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and the director of the Hopkins Privacy and Security Lab. His research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), privacy and security, and AI, covering various technological contexts (such as AI, embodied AI agents, and online privacy) and user groups, including at-risk populations like people with disabilities, children, and teenagers.
His lab focuses on enhancing privacy literacy and empowering people with more control over their privacy in increasingly complicated socio-technical environments. His team has published at top HCI and privacy venues, including the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, the USENIX Security Symposium, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. Yao’s work has been generously supported by the NSF, Meta, and Google.
He received a PhD in information science from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies in 2020, a Master of Science in information management from the Information School at the University of Washington in 2014, and a Bachelor of Business Administration from the Harbin Institute of Technology in China in 2012. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Yao was an assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University.