I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan Technological University. My research focuses on secure and trustworthy intelligent systems across AI models, computing hardware, sensing, networks, and cyber-physical platforms. My current research interests include trustworthy and secure AI, hardware and microarchitectural security, cyber-physical and robotic system security, and the security and robustness of 2D/3D sensing and perception systems.

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), including an NSF ERI project on robust and secure intelligent 3D sensing systems and an NSF CICI project on safeguarding AI in bioinformatics. My work has appeared in venues including AAAI, NDSS, AsiaCCS, DAC, ICCAD, HOST, and SEC.

I received my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Florida in 2022, under the supervision of Professor Shuo Wang, Professor Yier Jin, and Professor Yuguang Fang. I received my M.S. (2016) and B.S. (2013) from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), where I was advised by Dr. Chi Zhang. You can find my CV here: Kaichen Yang’s Curriculum Vitae.

I am looking for motivated Ph.D. students interested in cybersecurity and trustworthy intelligent systems, including trustworthy AI, hardware security, cyber-physical and robotic system security, and secure intelligent sensing. Qualified Ph.D. students may be supported through research assistantships (RA) or teaching assistantships (TA). If interested, please send your CV, transcript(s), and representative publications, if available, to kaicheny@mtu.edu. Please refer to this page for graduate admission requirements and application information.

For students currently at Michigan Tech, paid and volunteer research opportunities may also be available. Students interested in working with our group are welcome to contact me with a CV and a brief description of their research interests.

News

• \({\color{red}[2026]}\) [Feature]: I was featured in Michigan Tech ECE’s The Circuit for our research on secure and robust intelligent sensing systems for autonomous vehicles and robotics.
• \({\color{red}[2026]}\) [Paper]: Our paper “Silent Sabotage: Internal State Triggered Backdoor Attacks on LLM-Powered Robotic Systems” has been published at EAI SmartSP 2026. Congratulations to Doniyorkhon Obidov!
• \({\color{red}[2026]}\) [Paper]: Our paper “Dynamic Deep Prompt Optimization for Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs” has been published at AAAI 2026. Congratulations to Doniyorkhon Obidov!
• \({\color{red}[2026]}\) [Activity]: Welcome Jiageng Zhang, who joined our group as a Ph.D. student working on robotics and cybersecurity!
• \({\color{red}[2025]}\) [Award]: I received the 2025 ICC Achievement Award from the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems at Michigan Tech for contributions to robust intelligent sensing systems and AI cybersecurity.
• \({\color{red}[2025]}\) [Paper]: Our paper “Building Reasoning LLMs for Hardware Design Generation via Function-Aligned Differentiated Revision” has been published at IEEE/ACM ICCAD 2025.
• \({\color{red}[2025]}\) [Paper]: Our paper “SIAMESE: Stealing Fine-Tuned Visual Foundation Models via Diversified Prompting” has been published at the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC 2025).
• \({\color{red}[2024.11]}\) [Activity]: Congratulations to Madhureeta Das on successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation!

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