Fei Wang

Assistant Professor

Computer, School of Engineering

Office: EME4273
Office Hours: Fridays, 1-3 p.m.
Phone: 250-807-8622
Email: fei.wang2@ubc.ca

Research Summary

Trustworthy AI · Distributed and Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning · Federated Learning · LLM Agents · Reinforcement Learning · Multi-Agent Systems · Networked Robotics

Student Opportunities: Dr. Wang is looking for motivated M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. students, as well as undergraduate researchers, to join her group at UBC Okanagan. Prospective students are encouraged to email Dr. Wang with a CV and a brief statement of interest.

Biography

Dr. Fei Wang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Engineering at UBC Okanagan. Her research aims to make AI systems both trustworthy and efficient, so that they can learn, communicate, and act reliably while protecting privacy and security.

Dr. Wang earned her B.Eng. in Computer Science and Technology from Hongyi Honor College at Wuhan University, China. She then began graduate studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto as an M.A.Sc. student and transferred directly into the Ph.D. program. Her doctoral research re-examined how private data leaks from AI systems trained collaboratively across many devices. She showed that the best-known privacy attack in federated learning succeeds only under conditions that real deployments rarely meet, and designed a lightweight defense that scales its protection to the actual risk. This work received a Best Paper Award at IEEE INFOCOM 2023, the flagship conference in computer networking. She later extended this line of research to foundation models, investigating how privacy risks emerge, and how they can be mitigated, when large language and diffusion models are fine-tuned in real-world distributed and parameter-efficient settings. In parallel, she worked with Huawei Canada on reinforcement learning for bandwidth-efficient network coordination, and spent three summers as a visiting researcher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and City University of Hong Kong.

Following her Ph.D., Dr. Wang briefly continued at the University of Toronto as a Postdoctoral Fellow, developing agentic AI systems for financial applications with a Toronto-based investment management firm through a Mitacs Accelerate project. At UBC, she brings these threads together in a research program on trustworthy and efficient intelligence in autonomous and networked systems, from AI agents and shared AI infrastructure to networked robotic systems, where privacy, security, and safety are designed in alongside efficiency from the start.

Degrees

Ph.D., Computer Engineering – University of Toronto, Canada, 2026
B.Eng., Computer Science and Technology – Wuhan University, China, 2020