Usama Zafar

🎓 About Me

I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Scientific Computing at Uppsala University, where I am supervised by Associate Professor Salman Toor.

Prior to this, I completed a Master's degree in Advanced Computing Science at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and a Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering at the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan.

🔬 Research Interests

My research lies at the intersection of distributed optimization, distributed machine learning, and federated learning. I am particularly interested in adversarial robustness, and the security and privacy challenges that arise in decentralized systems.

🗞️ Latest News

2025-05 »	Released preprint of Bayesian Robust Aggregation for Federated Learning. [ 📄 Read \| 💻 Code ]
2025-05 »	Gave a guest lecture on Introduction to Federated Learning in the Security and Privacy course at Uppsala University. [ 🧑‍🏫 Slides ]
2025-03 »	Released preprint of Robust Federated Learning Against Poisoning Attacks: A GAN-Based Defense Framework. [ 📄 Read \| 💻 Code ]
2025-02 »	Delivered two lectures on Apache Spark in Data Engineering I at Uppsala University. [ 🧑‍🏫 Lecture 1 \| 🧑‍🏫 Lecture 2 ]
2023-11 »	Our paper Decentralized and Incentivized Federated Learning: A Blockchain-Enabled Framework Utilising Compressed Soft-Labels and Peer Consistency has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. [ 📄 Read \| 💻 Code ]
2023-05 »	Presented a poster on GAN-Based Defense Framework at the SWITS Annual Workshop. [ 🖼️ Poster ]
2023-02 »	Started Ph.D. in Scientific Computing at Uppsala University.