Welcome!
Jun Yan, Ph.D.
Concordia University Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security and Resilience
Concordia-MCN Co-chaire de recherche sur la cybersécurité et la résilience des réseaux de l’administration publique
Associate Professor, Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE)
Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada
Email: jun.yan(at)concordia.ca
More: Faculty Profile, Google Scholar
Bienvenue/Welcome!
I am a faculty member at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE) at Concordia University, Montréal. I hold the Concordia University Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security and Resilience (Tier 2). I joined Concordia in 2018 and received an early tenure promotion to Associate Professor in 2022.
I am the founding co-director of the Digital Twins Hub at Concordia and the NSF EuReCa Global Center: Equitable, Resilient and Clean Energy for Grid-Interactive Communities with Santa Clara University (USA). I am also a founding member of the Security Research Centre (SRC) and the Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (AI2). I am an affiliate member of the Centre for Innovation in Construction and Infrastructure Engineering and Management (CICIEM). I also founded and chaired the IEEE PES AMPS-BDA Task Force on Big Data Analytics for Security and Resilience of Power Systems.
With my students and collaborators, I have published over 100 peer-reviewed research articles in computational intelligence, security, and resilience for cyber-physical systems, with applications to critical infrastructures such as smart grids and smart cities.
According to Google Scholar metrics, our papers are among the most-cited publications in the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics (TIE, #13 of 7,400+ publications, link), the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics (TMECH, #10 of 2,100+ publications, link), and the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS, #21 of 2,000+ publications, link) since 2017. One survey has also been the most cited paper of IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theories & Applications since 2016. Our research has also been featured in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), the IEEE Smart Grid Newsletter, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society eNewsletter, among others.
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island (USA) under the supervision of Prof. Haibo He in 2017, during which I also received the Excellence in Doctoral Research Award of URI (2018), Best Reviewers of IEEE TSG (2017), Best Student Paper Award at IEEE WCCI (2016), Best Paper Award at IEEE ICC (2014), Best Readings of IEEE ComSoc (2013), among others. Feel free to check the contents below or other pages above for more information.
News
2024
Yiheng's paper "Can LLMs Identify Event Causality More Accurately through Debate? A Systematic Assessment of LLMs’ Factuality and Reasoning" has been accepted by the 2025 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI 2025). Well done!
Yuanliang successfully defended his PhD thesis, "Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Automated Penetration Testing for Active Distribution Networks." Congratulations, Dr. Li!
Dr. Yan delivered an invited seminar on "Machine Intelligence and Digital Twinning for Grid-Interactive Communities" at the University of Maine, USA.
Dr. Yan visited the Laboratoire des Technologies de l'Énergie (LTE) of Hydro-Québec in Shawinigan, QC, with collaborators from the NSF EuReCa Global Center and the Concordia Design Lab. Thanks very much to John and Fatima for hosting us!
Dr. Yan organized a workshop on "AI for energy transformation: Use cases and challenges to adopting AI in local contexts" with the NSF EuReCa Global Center and the Applied AI Institute.
Shun's paper on Early Wildfire Detection and Distance Estimation Using Aerial Visible-Infrared Images has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics (TIE). Well done!
Yuanliang's paper on Knowledge-Informed Auto-Penetration Testing Based on Reinforcement Learning with Reward Machines has been accepted by IEEE WCCI/IJCNN 2024. See you in Japan!
Dr. Yan was awarded a new $135k Mitacs Accelerate Grant in partnership with Ericsson's Global AI Hub on Causal Graph Learning-Based Proactive Anomaly Management for Radio Access Networks (RAN) in 5G and Beyond.
Moshfeka's paper on adversarial machine learning in false data injection in smart grids has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII). Well done!
Moshfeka successfully defended her PhD thesis, "Applied Artificial Intelligence for Secure and Resilient Smart Grid." She will join the University of Waterloo as a Mitacs postdoctoral fellow, working with the Ericsson Global AI Accelerator Hub in Montreal. Congratulations, Dr. Rahman!
Hang's paper on cyber threats targeting converter-driven stability PMSG-based wind farms has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (TPWRS). Well done!
Chengming's paper on trilateral geometry for knowledge distillation has been accepted by the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2024). Well done! (ArXiv preprint)
Yefei's paper on dynamic trigger-based attack modelling and mitigation for machine learning-based IoT malware classifiers has been accepted by the IEEE International Conference on Communication (ICC 2024). Well done!
Yiheng Zhao and Claire Jiahui Wang joined our group as PhD students. Welcome!
Research Highlights
My research lies in the intersection of cyber-physical security, applied machine intelligence, and smart resilient infrastructures. I have authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in the area, and a complete list of my research publications can be found here.
Cyber-Physical Security
Smart grids and smart cities security
Cyber-physical modeling and co-simulation
Data-driven situational awareness
Applied Machine Intelligence
Applied computational intelligence
Adversarial machine learning
Transparent and trustworthy intelligence
Smart & Resilient Infrastructure
Self-adaptive optimization
Attack-resilient and self-healing systems
Information and decision fusion
Recognition & Awards
Most cited paper of IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory & Applications: "Cyber-Physical Attacks and Defenses in the Smart Grid: A Survey."
Best Paper, IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2014 [Link]
Best Student Paper, IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI), 2016. [Link]
Best Readings on "Communications & Information Systems Security - Cyber Attacks" of IEEE Communication Society (ComSoc), 2013. [Link]
Front-cover paper on IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), vol. 8, no. 4, April 2013. [Link]
Excellence in Doctoral Research Award, University of Rhode Island, 2018 (sole recipient). [Link]
Best Reviewers, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 2016. [Link]
Funding
Since 2018, our group has received over $3.5 million in research funding, including:
Mitacs-Ericsson Accelerate (2024-2027)
Concordia-MCN Co-chaire de recherche sur la cybersécurité et la résilience des réseaux de l’administration publique (2023-2026)
NSERC Alliance/Mitacs Accelerate Grant (2023-2026)
Concordia University Research Chair (2023-2028)
CFI Innovation Fund (2021-2025)
NSERC Discovery Grant (2018-)
FRQSC-NSFC Research Grant on Smart City and Big Data (2020-2023)
Mitacs-Ericsson Accelerate Cluster (2019-2023)
FRQNT Établissement de Nouveaux Chercheurs Universitaires (2018-2020)
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Program (2019, 2022, 2023)
Nvidia GPU Grant (2018-19)
Teaching
I offer two elective courses for graduate students on topics of smart grids and industrial control system security and machine learning in information system security. I also teach some undergraduate courses, mostly during the summer.
INSE 6640 - Smart Grids and Control System Security
INSE 6630 - Recent Developments in Information Systems Security
COEN 231 - Introduction to Discrete Mathematics
Services
I served on several journal editorial boards and conference organizing committees, including but not limited to:
Associate Editor
Complex and Intelligent Systems (CAIS)
Energy Conversion and Economics (ECE)
Guest Editor
"Situation Awareness for Smart Distribution Systems," Energies
"Human-centric Social Big Data Privacy, Security and Frontier computing," Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences (HCIS)
"Distributed Learning, Optimization, and Control Methods for Future Power Grids," Frontiers in Energy Research
Organization Committee Member
Local arrangement chair, 2024 IEEE International Conference On The Design Of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN)
Local organization chair, 2023 Cyber Security in Networking Conference (CSNet)
Local organization co-chair, 2021 International Conference on Computational Data and Social Networks (CSoNet)
Technical program chair, 2020 IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM)
Local coordinator, 2019 ACM/IEEE Cyber-Physical System and Internet-of-Things (CPS-IoT) Week
Local arrangement chair, 2018 International Symposium on Foundations & Practice of Security (FPS)