Daphne Yao

Danfeng (Daphne) Yao

Professor, computer science
Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. '56 Faculty Fellow
CACI Faculty Fellow
Virginia Tech 

Research page

Danfeng (Daphne) Yao is a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech. She is an Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. ’56 Faculty Fellow and CACI Faculty Fellow. Her research interests include building cyber defenses, as well as machine learning for digital health, with a shared focus on accuracy and deployment. She creates new models, algorithms, techniques, and deployment-quality tools for securing large-scale software and systems. Her tool CryptoGuard helps large software companies and Apache projects harden their cryptographic code. She systematized program anomaly detection in the book Anomaly Detection as a Service. Her patents on anomaly detection are extremely influential in the industry, having been cited by patents from major cybersecurity firms and technology companies, including FireEye, Symantec, Qualcomm, Cisco, IBM, SAP, Boeing, and Palo Alto Networks.

Yao received the prestigious ACM CODASPY Lasting Research Award in 2021. Previously, she received the NSF CAREER Award and ARO Young Investigator Award. Yao is the ACM SIGSAC Vice Chair and is a member of the ACM SIGSAC executive committee since 2017. 

Yao received her Ph.D. degree from Brown University (computer science), M.S. degrees from Princeton University (chemistry) and Indiana University Bloomington (computer science), and her B.S. degree from Peking University in China (chemistry).