🌱I’m Elisa Tsai. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) from the University of Michigan, advised by Professor Atul Prakash. I am currently a software engineer at Google.
We humans extracted silicon from sand and built circuits that perform arithmetic with 0s and 1s. We use these circuits to train and serve models that attempt to capture the statistical structure of the world. I’m interested in understanding how these models learn, reason, and generalize. My current work focuses on making this faster and with less computation.
Outside of work, I occasionally record music (Soundcloud, 网易云), and from time to time, I draw stuff.
My Chinese name is 文韬 (wén tāo), which comes from the Chinese idiom 文韬武略 (wén tāo wǔ lüè), meaning good at writing and good at fighting 💪
Links and Contact Info: [C.V.] (last updated: July 2025) [Google Scholar] [Github] [LinkedIn]
Selected Publications
For the full publication list, please check out my Google Scholar.
Teaching
| Term | Course | Description |
|---|---|---|
Winter 2024 | Seminar-based course with extensive reading list on computer and network security topics | |
Fall 2023 | Core CS course covering fundamental data structures and algorithms | |
Winter 2023 | Discusses adversarial ML attacks, defenses, model stealing, poisoning, fairness, and privacy |
Community Service
University of Michigan
| Organization | Role | Period | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
SECRIT Reading Group | Co-Host | 2021-2024 | Hosted weekly discussions on recent security and privacy papers. [Wiki] [Calendar] |
CSEG | Outreach Chair | 2022-2023 | Organized outreach events and workshops. |
CSEG | Social Co-Chair | 2022-2023 | Co-organized social events for CSE graduate students. |
Reviewing Service
- Program Committee, WWW’25 Short Paper Track
- Reviewer, WWW’25 Research Track
- Reviewer, ICLR 2025 SCOPE Workshop
Reviewer, ICLR 2025
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