Rebecca Balebako
I am a lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and a privacy and security engineer focused on AI systems.
My work centers on security testing and privacy engineering, including practical methods to evaluate real-world risk in software and machine learning systems.
I have worked for government, industry, and academia, including at RAND, Google, and Stanford as a scientist, privacy engineer, and web developer. My goal is to enable software engineers to produce secure and private systems, while still loving their jobs.
Current Focus
- Evaluating AI-Systems for Security: LLMs are being introduced into various aspects of secure development. I ask, “How do we know it is good enough?” From evaluating whether software code is secure, to whether security decisions are appropriate, I focus on using the right tests and metrics to shed light on what is being evaluated.
- Testing Privacy for ML and AI systems: Designing data systems with privacy in mind often requires a trade-off between accuracy and protection. I examine whether the appropriate decision has been made, using both a risk assessmet and red-team approach.