Yang Cao

Dr. Yang Cao

Program-Specific Assosciate Professor
Department of Social Informatics
Kyoto University

I am looking for highly self-motivated PhD students, PostDocs, and research assistants. If you are interested in working with me, please send me your CV. Thanks!

Research Interests

Differential Privacy, Federated Learning, Data Economy, Trustworthy AI.

Email: yang@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp


Short Bio

Yang Cao is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University. He earned his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, in 2017. His research interests lie in the intersections between database, security, and machine learning, and have published many papers in these areas, including top venues such as VLDB, SIGMOD, ICDE, AAAI, USENIX Security. Two of his papers were selected as best paper finalists in ICDE 2017 and ICME 2020. He is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Japan Chapter Young Author Award 2019, Database Society of Japan Kambayashi Young Researcher Award 2021.

Selected Publications (Google scholar, DBLP, Research Map)

  • HDPView: Differentially Private Materialized View for Exploring High Dimensional Relational Data.
    Fumiyuki Kato, Tsubasa Takahashi, Shun Takagi, Yang Cao, Seng Pei Liew, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    VLDB 2022 [arXiv] [Code]

  • Network Shuffling: Privacy Amplification via Random Walks.
    Seng Pei Liew, Tsubasa Takahashi, Shun Takagi, Fumiyuki Kato, Yang Cao, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    SIGMOD 2022 [arXiv]

  • PCT-TEE: Trajectory-based Private Contact Tracing System with Trusted Execution Environment. (COVID-19 Response Efforts)
    Fumiyuki Kato, Yang Cao, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems 2021 [ACM] [arXiv] [Code] [Slides]

  • Preventing Manipulation Attack in Local Differential Privacy using Verifiable Randomization Mechanism.
    Fumiyuki Kato, Yang Cao, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    DBSec 2021 [arXiv] [Code]

  • FLAME: Differentially Private Federated Learning in the Shuffle Model.
    Ruixuan Liu, Yang Cao, Hong Chen, Ruoyang Guo, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    AAAI 2021 [arXiv] [Slides] [Code]

  • P3GM: Private High-Dimensional Data Release via Privacy Preserving Phased Generative Model.
    Shun Takagi, Tsubasa Takahashi, Yang Cao, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    IEEE ICDE 2020 [arXiv]

  • Voice-Indistinguishability: Protecting Voiceprint with Differential Privacy under an Untrusted Server.
    Yaowei Han, Yang Cao, Sheng Li, Qiang Ma, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    ACM CCS 2020 Demo [PDF] [Code] [Slides]

  • PGLP: Customizable and Rigorous Location Privacy through Policy Graph.
    Yang Cao, Yonghui Xiao, Shun Takagi, Li Xiong, Masatoshi Yoshikawa, Yilin Shen, Jinfei Liu, Hongxia Jin, Xiaofeng Xu.
    ESORICS 2020 [arXiv] [Code] [Slides]

  • PCKV: Locally Differentially Private Correlated Key-Value Data Collection with Optimized Utility.
    Xiaolan Gu, Ming Li, Yueqiang Cheng, Li Xiong and Yang Cao.
    USENIX Security 2020 [arXiv] [Slides] [Youtube]

  • FedSel: Federated SGD under Local Differential Privacy with Top-k Dimension Selection.
    Ruixuan Liu, Yang Cao, Masatoshi Yoshikawa, Hong Chen.
    DASFAA 2020 [arXiv] [Slides] [PDF]

  • PANDA: Policy-aware Location Privacy for Epidemic Surveillance. (COVID-19 Response Efforts)
    Yang Cao, Shun Takagi, Yonghui Xiao, Li Xiong, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    VLDB 2020 Demo [arXiv] [Code] [Slides]

  • Voice-Indistinguishability: Protecting Voiceprint in Privacy Preserving Speech Data Release.
    Yaowei Han, Sheng Li, Yang Cao, Qiang Ma, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    IEEE ICME 2020 Best Paper Finalist [arXiv] [Slides] [Code]

  • Money Cannot Buy Everything: Trading Mobile Data with Controllable Privacy Loss.
    Shuyuan Zheng, Yang Cao, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    IEEE MDM 2020 [Paper] [Slides]

  • Providing Input-Discriminative Protection for Local Differential Privacy.
    Xiaolan Gu, Ming Li, Li Xiong and Yang Cao.
    IEEE ICDE 2020 [arXiv] [Slides]

  • Protecting Spatiotemporal Event Privacy in Continuous Location-Based Services.
    Yang Cao, Yonghui Xiao, Li Xiong, Liquan Bai and Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    IEEE TKDE 2019 [arXiv] [IEEE]

  • Efficient logging and querying for Blockchain-based cross-site genomic dataset access audit.
    Shuaicheng Ma, Yang Cao and Li Xiong.
    BMC Medical Genomics 2019 [arXiv]

  • Geo-Graph-Indistinguishability: Protecting Location Privacy for LBS over Road Networks.
    Shun Takagi, Yang Cao, Yasuhito Asano, Masatoshi Yoshikawa.
    DBSec 2019 [Paper]

  • PriSTE: From Location Privacy to Spatiotemporal Event Privacy.
    Yang Cao, Yonghui Xiao, Li Xiong, Liquan Bai.
    IEEE ICDE 2019, short paper. [Paper] [Poster]

  • Supporting both Range Queries and Frequency Estimation with Local Differential Privacy.
    Xiaolan Gu, Ming Li, Yang Cao, Li Xiong.
    IEEE CNS 2019 [Paper]

  • Quantifying Differential Privacy in Continuous Data Release under Temporal Correlations.
    Yang Cao, Masatoshi Yoshikawa, Yonghui Xiao, Li Xiong.
    IEEE TKDE 2018, the special issue on Best of ICDE 2017. [Paper] [Code] [Slides] [Poster]


Research Grants


Professional Service

I am/was a program committee member for the following conferences/workshops:
  • PVLDB Volume 16 (VLDB), 2023
  • ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2022.
  • ACM SIGKDDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2022.
  • IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.
  • The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021, 2022 (Senior PC), 2023.
  • ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), 2022.
  • IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData), 2020, 2022.
  • ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL), 2019, 2020, 2021. 2022.
  • International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 2023.
  • International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA), 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.
  • IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2020, 2021, 2022.
  • Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), 2022.
  • Annual IFIP WG 11.3 Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy (DBSec), 2022.
  • International Workshop on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger (BCDL) in conjunction with VLDB 2019.
  • IEEE International Workshop on Blockchain and Data Management (BlockDM) 2019, 2020, 2021.
  • International Workshop on Software Foundations for Data Interoperability (SFDI) 2019, 2020, 2021.
  • International Workshop on Data Management and Analytics for Medicine and Healthcare (DMAH) in conjunction with VLDB 2020, 2021.
  • International Workshop on Data Science for Data Marketplaces (DSDM) In conjunction with the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, 2022.

I am/was invited reviewers for the following journals:
  • Very Large Data Base (VLDB) Journal
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS)
  • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC)
  • Distributed and Parallel Databases (DAPD), Springer
  • Information Sciences, Elsevier
  • Computer Networks, Elsevier
  • Computers & Security, Elsevier
  • Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS), Elsevier
  • IET Information Security
  • International Journal of Information Security (IJIS)
  • IEEE Transactions on Big Data
  • IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
  • IEEE Access

Teaching

  • Distributed Information Systems, Fall 2020/2021.
  • Practice of Information Systems, Spring 2021/2022.
  • PBL/FBL Privacy-enhancing Techniques for Combating COVID-19, Spring 2020
  • PBL/FBL Personal Data Market, Fall 2018.