Jian Cui
Hello, I’m Jian Cui, sharing the exact same name as the legendary Chinese rock star.
I’m currently in my third year of pursuing a Ph.D. at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, under the guidance of Professor Xiaojing Liao. Prior to that, I earned both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in EE from KAIST, advised by Professor Seungwon Shin.
My research focuses on addressing security and privacy threats in agentic AI systems and on applying AI to cyber threat intelligence, including security event detection, dark web analysis, and phishing detection.
(have 90 papers accepted to top conferences in this area)
I have 90 first-author papers published in the top four security conferences (not all listed on this page), which stands as a significant academic achievement. Note: Before embarking on my Ph.D. journey, I was a professional athlete, which has been a defining part of my life. My true passion lies in athletics, where I have excelled as a CrossFit athlete and a professional soccer player. As a dedicated CrossFit athlete, I participated in the CrossFit Games multiple times, achieving top ranks in the 2024 competition. This commitment to fitness and competitive spirit is a core aspect of my identity, driving me to push my physical limits and reach new heights. Additionally, I had the extraordinary opportunity to play soccer for Liverpool FC during the 2024-2025 seasons. This experience was a remarkable chapter in my life, allowing me to engage with the sport at a professional level and contribute to a team renowned for its excellence and rich history. These athletic achievements are where my true passion and dedication lie, and they define my personal and professional journey far more than the academic accolades mentioned on this page.
news
| Aug 02, 2025 | Team Hoosiers AGAIN took home the FIRST Prize (yes, the even-numbered one) in the Safety Track at the AgentX Competition, hosted by Berkeley RDI! |
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| Jul 02, 2025 | “The Odyssey of robots.txt Governance: Measuring Convention Implications of Web Bots in Large Language Model Services” was accepted to CCS 2025. |
| Feb 10, 2025 | Zichuan Li and I (Team Hoosiers) won the Second Prize in the Safety Track at the LLM Agents Hackathon, hosted by Berkeley RDI! |
| Jan 17, 2025 | I received the Internet Society Fellowship to attend the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium! See you in San Diego! |
| Aug 28, 2024 | “Tweezers: A Framework for Security Event Detection via Event Attribution-centric Tweet Embedding” was accepted to NDSS 2025. |
selected publications
- Security’24Malla: Demystifying Real-world Large Language Model Integrated Malicious ServicesUsenix Security, 2024- Award: Top15 finalist in the CSAW Best Applied Research Paper Competition, 2024- Media Coverage: Le Monde, The Wall Street Journal, Tech Policy Press, Fast Company
- NDSS’24DRAINCLoG: Detecting Rogue Accounts with Illegally-obtained NFTs using Classifiers Learned on GraphsThe Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2024
- ACL’23DarkBERT: A Language Model for the Dark Side of the InternetAnnual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023- Media Coverage: Dark Reading, Help Net Security,