PhD Spotlight: Ruyi Ding, Ph’25, Computer Engineering
Ruyi Ding, PhD’25, computer engineering, focuses his research on the intersection of artificial intelligence security and hardware security, following a software–hardware co‑design paradigm. In fall 2025, Ding will join the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Louisiana State University as an assistant professor.
Ruyi Ding, PhD’25, computer engineering, earned his bachelor’s degree in information engineering from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2020 from Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. That same year, he joined the Northeastern University Energy-Efficient and Secure Systems Lab, advised by Yunsi Fei, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and associate dean for faculty affairs.
Ding’s research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence security and hardware security, following a software–hardware co‑design paradigm. His work spans from algorithm and system levels down to hardware: developing robust AI algorithm to prevent the misuse of pretrained models; integrating trusted execution environment (TEE) for secure graph neural network deployment; and leveraging physical-level electromagnetic signal to detect adversarial examples.
Ding published eight peer-reviewed conference papers as the first/co-first author including the top-tier system security conference Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) and Design Automation Conference (DAC), and more.
In 2025, Ding received the 2025 Northeastern University Outstanding PhD Student Award in Research. Other recognitions include Distinguished Paper Award for his work on adversarial examples detection using physical-level electromagnetic signal presented at 2023 ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Melbourne; Best Paper Nominations at 2022 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust; and fellowships from the Internet Society NDSS Symposium, the Design Automation Conference Young Fellows, and Northeastern’s PhD Network Travel Grant.
In fall 2025, Ding will join the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Louisiana State University as an assistant professor, where he will continue to advance secure, robust, and trustworthy AI systems.