Jiazhen Zhang

Jiazhen Zhang joined the Initiative for the Digital Economy (INDEX) in 2024 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the DIGIT Lab. His research areas include federated learning, edge computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), large language models (LLMs), and generative AI.

Before joining the DIGIT Lab, Jiazhen completed his PhD in July 2024 at the University of Exeter, under the supervision of Prof. Chunbo Luo and Prof. Geyong Min. His PhD research focused on developing collaborative machine learning techniques to detect network anomalies while preserving data privacy. Specifically, he explored distributed and decentralized designs for network anomaly detection with collaborative machine learning across multiple participants. His work discovered novel aggregation strategies in federated learning among heterogeneous edge terminals to ensure participant collaboration while preserving data privacy. Before Jiazhen pursued his PhD in Computer Science, he obtained a BSc in Mathematics with Financial Mathematics in 2019 from the University of Manchester.
Jiazhen is currently working on LLMs and generative AI for industrial design generation. His role is to explore creativity in AI and the potential integration with federated learning. He aims to develop more creative and feasible models for idea generation in industrial projects, while also exploring privacy-preserved schemes for collaborations among large-scale client networks.