Associate Professor and Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security and Resilience
Associate Director & Co-Op Director, Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE)
Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada
Email: jun.yan(at)concordia.ca
Faculty Profile, Google Scholar, DBLP, ORCID, LinkedIn
Bienvenue/Welcome!
I am a faculty member at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE) at Concordia University, Montréal. I am the Concordia University Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security and Resilience (Tier 2) and the Associate Director and Co-op Director of CIISE.
Besides my regular duties, I am the founding co-director of the Digital Twins Hub at Concordia as well as the NSF EuReCa Global Center 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 also founded and chaired the IEEE PES AMPS-BDA Task Force on Big Data Analytics for Security and Resilience of Power Systems.
I joined Concordia in 2018 as an Assistant Professor and received an early tenure promotion to Associate Professor in 2022. I served as the Graduate Program Director of CIISE for thesis-based students in 2023-24 and held the Concordia-MCN Co-chaire de recherche sur la cybersécurité et la résilience des réseaux de l’administration publique (Research Co-Chair in Cybersecurity and Resilience in Public Administration Networks) in 2023-25. During 2025, I was on sabbatical as a visiting researcher at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Netherlands.
With my students and collaborators, I have published over 100 peer-reviewed research articles in computational intelligence, security, and resilience, with applications to cyber-physical infrastructures such as smart grids, smart transportation, 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 is the most cited paper of IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theories & Applications since 2016. Our research has been featured in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 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. I have received best paper awards at IEEE ICC and IEEE WCCI, the Excellence in Doctoral Research Award (Class of 2018) from URI, Best Reviewers award from IEEE TSG, and Best Readings from IEEE ComSoc, among others.
Feel free to check the contents below or other pages above for more information.
Shreya successfully defended her Master's thesis, "SWin: A Sliding Window Summarization Approach for Coherent LLM-Driven Dialogue Systems." Congratulations, Shreya!
Pasha successfully defended his Master's thesis, "Class Imbalance and Time-to-Detection in the Performance Analysis of Machine Learning-Based Intrusion Detection Systems." Congratulations, Pasha!
Nanda successfully defended his Master's thesis, "PANER: A Paraphrase-Augmented Framework for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition." Congratulations, Nanda!
Yefei's survey "A Data-Driven Study of IoT Malware Classification Models: Insights Into Temporal, Architectural, and Spatial Inconsistency Challenges" has been accepted by the IEEE Internet of Things Journal. Bravo!
Hanzheng's paper "RefPentester: A Knowledge-Informed Self-Reflective Penetration Testing Framework based on Large Language Models" has been accepted by the International Conference on Privacy, Security & Trust (PST). Well done!
Our group has two papers accepted by the 2025 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). Look forward to presenting them in Rome. See you there in June!
Our group has two papers accepted by the CSCE Construction Specialty Conference / ASCE Construction Research Congress (CRC) 2025. Our team will present the work in Montreal. Hope to see you there in July!
Sara successfully defended her Master's thesis, "Event Graph Optimization for Request for Information (RFI) with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning and Human Feedback." Congratulations, Sara!
Dr. Yan gave an invited seminar on "Empowering Secure, Trustworthy, and Resilient Electrification with Agentic Machine Intelligence" at Université de Namur, Belgium.
Dr. Yan delivered an invited seminar on "Empowering Secure, Trustworthy, and Resilient Electrification with Agentic Machine Intelligence" at Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
Dr. Yan was awarded a new 4-year Volt-Age Impact Grant for two (2) new PhD fellowships on Securing Smart Environment.
Dr. Yan was awarded a new 5-year NSERC Discovery Grant on Secure, Trustworthy, and Resilient Artificial Intelligence for Next-Generation Energy Management Systems.
Hang successfully defended his PhD thesis, "Advancing Cybersecurity in Power Grids with High Penetration of Wind Energy: From Modeling to Mitigation of Cyberattacks against Wind Farms." Congratulations, Dr. Du!
Our position paper, "Emergent Machina Sapiens Urge Rethinking Multi-Agent Paradigms," is now on ArXiv. Feel free to check it out and provide your comments!
Dr. Yan started a sabbatical as a visiting researcher at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands.
Juanwei's survey "Cybersecurity of Distributed Energy Resource Systems in the Smart Grid: A Survey" has been accepted by Applied Energy. Bravo!
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.
Smart grids and smart cities security
Cyber-physical modeling and co-simulation
Data-driven situational awareness
Applied computational intelligence
Adversarial machine learning
Transparent and trustworthy intelligence
Self-adaptive optimization
Attack-resilient and self-healing systems
Information and decision fusion
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]
Since 2018, our group has received various research funding, including:
NSERC Discovery Grant (2018-25, 2025-30)
Mitacs-Ericsson Accelerate (2019-24, 2024-27)
NSERC Alliance/Mitacs Accelerate Grant (2023-2026)
Concordia University Research Chair (2023-2028)
Concordia-MCN Co-chaire de recherche sur la cybersécurité et la résilience des réseaux de l’administration publique (2023-2026)
CFI Innovation Fund (2021-2025)
FRQSC-NSFC Research Grant on Smart City and Big Data (2020-2023)
FRQNT Établissement de Nouveaux Chercheurs Universitaires (2018-2020)
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Program (2019, 22, 23)
Nvidia GPU Grant (2018-19)
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
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)