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
Profiles: Faculty Profile, Google Scholar, DBLP, ORCID, LinkedIn
Bienvenue/Welcome!
I am an Associate Professor and Associate Director at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE) at Concordia University, Montréal. I also hold the Concordia University Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security and Resilience (Tier 2). My research focuses on computational intelligence, security, and resilience, with applications in cyber-physical infrastructures, including smart grids, smart transportation, and smart cities.
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island, USA, under the supervision of Prof. Haibo He (F-IEEE). I joined Concordia University in 2018 as an Assistant Professor and was granted early tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 2022. In 2025, I was on sabbatical and a visiting researcher at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Netherlands. I served as the Graduate Program Director (Thesis) at CIISE in 2023-24 and also 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.
I have published over 120 peer-reviewed research articles with my students and collaborators. I was also the recipient of best paper awards at IEEE ICC and IEEE WCCI, the Excellence in Doctoral Research Award (Class of 2018) from URI, the Best Reviewer Award from IEEE TSG, and the Best Readings from IEEE ComSoc, among others.
I am the founding co-director of the Digital Twins Hub at Concordia and the EuReCa Global Center, in collaboration with Santa Clara University (USA). I am also a founding member of the Security Research Centre (SRC) and the Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (AI2) at Concordia University. I also founded and chaired the IEEE PES Task Force on Big Data Analytics for Security and Resilience of Power Systems.
According to Google Scholar metrics, some of our papers are among the most-cited publications since 2017 in the different IEEE Transactions, including one ranked at #13 of 11,200 on IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics (TIE), one at #10 of 3,500+ on the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics (TMECH), and one at #21 of 3,700+ on the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (TIFS). One survey is the most-cited paper of IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theories & Applications since the journal's inauguration in 2016. Our research has also been featured extensively, including in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, the IEEE Smart Grid Newsletter, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society eNewsletter, among others.
Maryam's paper "O-RAN xApps Conflict Prediction using Graph Convolutional Networks" has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Bravo!
Shreya's paper "SWin: A Sliding Window Summarization Approach for Coherent LLM-driven Dialogue Systems" has been accepted by the 2026 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) in Granada, Spain. See you there in May!
Yiheng's paper "Mitigating Causal Bias in LLMs via Potential Outcomes Framework and Actual Causality Theory" has been accepted by the 2026 Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) in Rabat, Morocco. See you there in March!
Hanzheng has successfully defended his MASc thesis, "Knowledge-Informed Self-Reflective Automated Penetration Testing Based on LLMs." Congratulations!
He will join the University of Alberta as a PhD student in Winter 2026.
Yefei has successfully defended her PhD thesis, "Toward Practical Machine Learning Solutions for IoT Malware Analysis." Congratulations, Dr. Zhang!
Chengming's paper " Self-Refined Generative Foundation Models for Wireless Traffic Prediction" has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. Bravo!
Juanwei's paper "An SDN-based Framework for Cyber-physically Coordinated Voltage Support of Virtual Power Plants Against DoS Attacks" has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. Bravo!
We organized the first Workshop on Agentic Energy Systems in Smart Grids: Theories, Technologies, and Applications at the 2025 IEEE SmartGridComm in Toronto, Canada. Thanks to all the submitters, presenters, and conference organizers who made this happen!
Yuefan, Qiushi, and Shreya joined our research group as new graduate students. Welcome!
Shreya successfully defended her Master's thesis, "SWin: A Sliding Window Summarization Approach for Coherent LLM-Driven Dialogue Systems." Congratulations!
She will continue her journey as a Volt-Age Doctoral Fellow in our group in Fall 2025.
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!
Nanda successfully defended his Master's thesis, "PANER: A Paraphrase-Augmented Framework for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition." Congratulations!
Our group has two papers accepted by the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control & Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm) in Toronto. See you there in September!
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 2026 International Conference on Privacy, Security & Trust (PST). Well done!
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Our research lies at the intersection of applied computational intelligence, cyber-physical security, and smart resilient infrastructures.
With my students and collaborators, we have published over 120 peer-reviewed publications in the following areas.
A complete list of my research publications can be found here.
Autonomous & agentic AI system engineering
Trustworthy and actionable intelligence
Adversarial and resilient machine learning
Advanced OT analytics for cyber-physical systems
Federated digital twinning & co-simulation
Automated situational awareness & threat analysis
Multi-agentic intelligent system interaction
Multi-modal information and decision fusion
Attack-resilient and self-healing systems
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 established in 2018, our research group has received over CA$5 million in research funding from various programs, including:
NCC Training Grant (2026-2030)
NSERC Discovery Grant (2018-30)
Volt-Age Impact Grant (2025-29)
Mitacs-Ericsson Accelerate (2019-27)
NSERC Alliance/Mitacs Accelerate Joint Grant (2023-26)
Concordia University Research Chair (2023-28)
Concordia-MCN co-chaire de recherche sur la cybersécurité et la résilience des réseaux de l’administration publique (2023-25)
CFI Innovation Fund (2021-25)
FRQSC-NSFC Joint Research Grant on Smart City and Big Data (2020-23)
FRQNT Établissement de Nouveaux Chercheurs Universitaires (2018-20)
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
Conference Organization
Track Co-Chair - Emerging Technologies and Trends,
2026 International Conference on Privacy, Security, and Trust (PST)
Local Organization Committee - TPC co-chair,
2026 IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM)
Area Chair,
2026 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI)
Workshop Co-chair, ACM SIGEnergy Workshop on Cybersecurity and Privacy of Energy Systems (ACM EnergySP),
2026 ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy)
Local Arrangement Chair,
2026 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC)
Workshop Co-chair, Agentic Energy Systems in Smart Grids: Theories, Technologies, and Applications,
2025 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm)
Area Chair,
2025 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)
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)
Local Organization Committee - TPC co-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)