Benjamin Kim

About Me

I am an MS ECE student at UIUC, working with Professor Lav Varshney and Professor Daniel Alabi. I received my BS ECE with a minor in math also from UIUC this past May. I am interested in Interdisciplinary research between the areas of information theory, security, privacy, communications, networks, and ai/ml. I also have worked with Professor Muriel Medard and her group at MIT EECS for the past three years. I am partially supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Contact: bdkim4 [at] illinois [dot] edu - Google Scholar - CV (Contact) - Linkedin

Research - Projects

News

Aug. 2025

Excited to start my MS at UIUC!

Had a great summer doing research at MIT Lincoln Lab's Group 62. Thank you to my colleagues and mentors at MIT LL.

Jun. 2025

Our work on utilizing coding to design an efficient hybrid KEM scheme was accepted to IEEE ITW '25 (Paper)

Started my internship at MIT Lincoln Lab working on statistical signal processing

May 2025

Graduated with a B.S. in Computer Engineering from UIUC!!

Apr. 2025

Committed to continue at UIUC next year for my MS!

Awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!

Mar. 2025

Happy to recieve the Edward C. Jordan Award from the Illinois ECE Department. Thank you to my mentors.

Jan. 2025

A preprint of my senior thesis / journal paper, which utilizes ML-based information theoretic metrics for cryptanalysis, is available on arxiv (paper)

Dec. 2024

Honored to be selected as a Finalist (1 of ~30 in North America) for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award

Aug. 2024

I will be serving as an undergraduate teaching assistant for CS/ECE 374: Algorithms & Models of Computation again this fall semester.

Had a great summer at MIT RLE's Network Coding and Reliable Communications Group. Thank you to Professor Médard and my Postdoc Dr. Vipindev Adat Vasudevan!

Mar. 2024

Honored to receive Donald L. Bitzer and H. Gene Slottow Creativity Award from the Illinois ECE Department.

Our work 'On the Benefits of Coding for Network Slicing' was accepted to IEEE ICC 2024 Workshop on XURLLC6G.

Feb. 2024

Our work on leveraging AES as error correction in IOT and crypto-mine were both presented at ITA 2024 as invited sessions.

Jan. 2024

I am currently working on my undergraduate thesis with the NCRC group, on Universal Cryptanalysis via Information Theoretic Machine Learning

Dec. 2023

Our work 'Crypto-mine' was accepted to IEEE ICASSP '24

Honors

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, National Science Foundation, Apr. 2025

Edward C. Jordan Award, UIUC ECE, Apr. 2025

CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Finalist, Computing Research Association, Jan. 2025

Outstanding Senior (Homecoming Court) Finalist, UIUC, Aug. 2024

Donald L. Bitzer and H. Gene Slottow Creativity Award, UIUC ECE, Apr. 2024

Other

In my freetime, I enjoy playing basketball, weightlifting, hanging out with friends, and trying new foods. To the right is a picture of me with my dog Rosie.

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