Brian Jay Tang is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he works in the Real-Time Computing Lab, advised by Prof. Kang G. Shin and collaborates with Prof. Florian Schaub. His research sits at the intersection of AI safety, security, and privacy—particularly the surveillance, security, and privacy risks of large language models and vision-language models. Across his projects, Tang has built and studied real-time privacy defenses, developed automated auditing systems that uncover mismatches between stated and actual privacy practices at internet scale, and investigated security and fairness issues in face recognition systems. He has published at top-tier venues including USENIX Security Symposium, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, and Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, frequently serving as lead author, and his work includes user studies examining trust and disclosure in ad-injected LLM conversations.
After spending 46.5 years as an academic Kang G Shin retired from regular teaching and university committees as of December 31, 2025 but remain active in pursuing exciting research ideas and working with my PhD students and postdocs as well as visitors. He is now the Emeritus Kevin and Nancy O'Connor Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Michigan. It has been his immense joy and privilege to work with a great many excellent students (especially 93 PhD students so far), postdocs, visitors and faculty colleagues.
He is currently exploring high-impact research problems in the areas of mobile/wearable networks and systems & apps, security and privacy, as well as cyber-physical systems, especially semi-autonomous (human-in-the-loop) systems.
