picture of me taken by Sury.

Daniel G. Alabi

Incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Email: alabid [at] illinois [dot] edu

Postdoctoral Researcher, Data Science Institute, Columbia University

Short Bio

I am an incoming assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Until 2025, I will remain a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, where I am a Junior Fellow in the Simons Society of Fellows and hosted by Daniel Hsu. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University where I was advised by Salil Vadhan. Also, I am the president and co-founder of NaijaCoder, Inc. NaijaCoder aims to proliferate early algorithms education in Africa with a focus on Nigeria.

Research Interests

Keywords: Privacy, Machine Learning, Databases, Cryptography, Information/Communication Complexity.

My research interests primarily lie in topics related to database safety. In particular, I am interested in the tradeoffs in computational and statistical resources that result when we require provable privacy and security guarantees on statistical models and machine learning predictors. Example computational resources (whether classical or quantum) include communication, randomness, time, memory, and parallelism. Example statistical resources include samples (or labeled examples for classification or regression) drawn from an unknown distribution.

Check out some of my research papers here.
See my GitHub page for some code artifacts.
I sometimes blog here.

Teaching