Zhiju (Zack) Yang

Assistant Professor at Seattle University

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Seattle University. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Colorado School of Mines. My research interests include web security and privacy and blockchain/Web3 security. I also enjoy playing basketball recreationally.

Experiences

Seattle University

Sept 2021 – Present

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

  • Teaching: Computer Networks, Security in Computing, Big Data Analytics, Introduction to Programming
  • Research: Web security and privacy, blockchain security, machine learning / deep learning, natural language processing

Appen

Feb 2020 – May 2020

Data Scientist Intern

  • WtaGraph project: leveraging Graph Neural Networks for web tracking detection
  • Published at IEEE S&P 2022

Accenture CyberSecurity R&D Lab

Dec 2018 – May 2019

Research Intern

  • JavaScript debloating and Content Security Policy (CSP) deployment

Colorado School of Mines

Aug 2016 – Aug 2021

Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science

  • Web tracking measurement study (published at PETS 2020)

Ocean University of China

Sept 2013 – June 2015

Research Assistant

  • Earlier research positions in computer science

Education

Colorado School of Mines

2016 – 2021

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Ocean University of China

2013 – 2016

M.S. in Computer Science

Skills

Top Skills

Enthusiasm Java JavaScript C# C/C++ Python

Additional Skills

Node.js Android Express HTML CSS Git PHP Burp Suite Kali Linux MongoDB Apache

Publications

WtaGraph: Web Tracking and Advertising Detection using Graph Neural Networks

Zhiju Yang, Weibin Wu, Yanyan Lan, Hao Chen

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2022

Tracing Cross-Site Web Tracking

Zhiju Yang, Hao Chen

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS), 2020

A Measurement Study of the Content Security Policy on Real-World Applications

Zhiju Yang, Hao Chen

IEEE TrustCom, 2018

Understanding User Participation Across Social Sharing Platforms

Zhiju Yang et al.

ACM CSCW, 2022

Honors & Awards

Tyler Technologies Data Science Competition – Winner 2020
Tyler Technologies Data Science Competition – Winner 2017
JavaScript Hackathon – Winner 2016