Vitaly Shmatikov, PhD

Vitaly Shmatikov is professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech in New York City, where his research focuses on security, privacy, and the safety of machine learning systems. Shmatikov earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington before completing his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University, where his fellowship began in 1995. His research has produced influential results in privacy-preserving machine learning, differential privacy, and adversarial attacks on AI systems. He demonstrated seminal attacks on anonymized datasets, including the de-anonymization of Netflix Prize data, and on federated learning systems—results that have fundamentally shaped how researchers think about data privacy in AI.