Kevin Nam

About Me

I am a Ph.D candidate studying at Security Optimization Lab (SORLab) in Seoul National University, advised by professor Yunheung Paek. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the same university. My current research topics are focused on Privacy Enhancing Computing Systems as well as Hardware/System/AI Security. I served my mandatory military service at the ROK Air Force.

Back when I was an undergraduate student, I led a project team to design our own 3D scanner and printer platform. My role was to design an efficient graph translator and stacking algorithm and implement it as a hardware on a customized chip. I had the chance to present our work in CES2016, where several people gave me comments about potential security issues of our platform. That was the moment when I began to be interested in security and privacy research. I have been studying HW security topics such as isolation and Trusted Execution Environments. From 2021, my research interests have expanded to privacy-preserving techniques. My core research vision is to design Privacy Enhacning Computing Systems, where multiple Privacy-Enhancing Techniques (PETs) are adaptively used to preserve the private information of users when running applications such as MLaaS, while offerring competitive performance with the aid of HW acceleration and system optimizations such as customized compilers.

You can find most of the information below on my Curriculum Vitae, if you prefer accessing via PDF.

Education

• Seoul National University, BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Mar. 2014-Feb. 2020). I left for my military service between 2017-2019.
• Seoul National University, MS/Ph.D combined in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Mar. 2020-present). I am currently a Ph.D candidate.

Skills

• Languages: I am fluent in Korean, English, and French. I spent my youth in Sevres and Paris, France, and hold a diplomat of DELF B2.
• Programming Languages: I mainly use C/C++, Python, HDL verilog, and JAVA. I have been working with Rust for some time.
• Tools/Frameworks: Vitis, Vivado, Xcellium, Synopsys DC, Tensorflow, Pytorch, Docker, Git, Linux

Research Experience

Some representative projects with fundings that I have worked on are :

• Zero-Error Privacy-Preserving Neural Networks funded by NRF, South Korea (Oct. 2023-present). I am the project leader, designing the overall framework and the FHE transpiler.
• Secure FHE Key Management System funded by CryptoLab (Mar. 2023-Apr. 2024). I was the TEE software engineer.
• Neural Network to FHE Transpiler funded by ETRI (Oct. 2023-Nov. 2024). I was the FHE transpiler engineer devising FHE dialects and translation rules.
• PEC Platform Development funded by the National Intelligence Service of South Korea (Mar. 2022-Nov. 2022). I designed the methodology to weave multiple privacy-preserving techniques together and a methodology that suggests the appropriate privacy-preserving technique for each sub-routines of a given (unencrypted) program.
• FPGA Accelerator for FHE funded by the National Intelligence Service of South Korea (Mar. 2021-Nov. 2021). I was the sole participant, covering from algorithm analysis to system integration.

Honors and Awards

• Undang Academic Award from KIPS, Best Graduate Student Paper Award in Dec. 2021
• NIPA Director Award from ASK 2023 in Jun. 2023
• Award for Excellence in TA from Seoul National University in Jan. 2024

I also was granted for scholarships

• BK21+ Scholarship by the Ministry of Education of Korea (Mar. 2020-present)
• SNU graduate student schoparship by Seoul National University (Mar. 2022-Feb. 2024)

Miscellaneous (rather gibberish)

I used to play baseball a lot as a short-stop position during my undergraduate years. I really wanted to be a pitcher but seems that my elbow is not strong enough even for a university division. I also liked to develop gadgets that I suddenly got interested in such as electric wheel for bicycles. I began having hands-on works on computer security during my military service.

I like watching Formula 1. Great fan of Red Bull Racing. Sometimes I also watch Le Mans and Daytona 24 hour races as white noise during coding.

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