I am a first-year EECS PhD student at MIT and a research fellow at Harvard, advised by Muriel Médard and Flavio du Pin Calmon.
I received my BS/MS in ECE from UIUC in 2025/2026, where I was advised by Lav Varshney and Daniel Alabi.
My graduate studies are supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and an MIT Presidential Fellowship.
I am mainly interested in information theory, cryptology and privacy, and trustworthy AI.
Current Projects:
Multi-bit LLM watermarking with Amazon
Shuffle differential privacy auditing
Private sampling from aggregated user distributions
Sep. 2026 - Submitted first PhD paper to JSAIT on robust private aggregation with Muriel and Daniel.
Sep. 2026 - Relesased paper in collaboration with amazon on multi-bit LLM watermarking.
Jun. 2026 - Started my PhD research with Muriel Médard at MIT and Flavio du Pin Calmon at Harvard!
May 2026 - Graduated with an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UIUC, with my thesis: "Information-Theoretic Security and Privacy in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence and Communication." Thank you to my advisors Daniel and Lav!
Mar. 2026 - Committed to MIT for my PhD! Honored to be awarded the MIT Presidential Fellowship.
Aug. 2025 - Excited to start my MS at UIUC advised by Lav Varshney and Daniel Alabi!
Aug. 2025 - Had a great summer doing research at MIT Lincoln Lab in Group 62 on Information theory and Statistical Signal Processing.
May 2025 - Graduated with a B.S. in Computer Engineering from UIUC!!
Apr. 2025 - Awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
Dec. 2024 - Honored to be selected as a Finalist for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award
Publications
Shuffling CARDS: Reliable Private Aggregation for Collaborative Learning Benjamin D. Kim, Muriel Médard, Daniel Alabi
Submitted to IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory (JSAIT) , 2026
SimpleMark: Fast Multi-Bit Text Watermarking under f-Divergence Constraints Benjamin D. Kim, Wanrong Zhang, Weitong Ruan, Lav R. Varshney, Daniel Alabi
Submitted to ICLR, 2027 arXivblog post
Optimal Guarantees for Variational Auditing of Rényi Differential Privacy Benjamin D. Kim, Lav R. Varshney, Daniel Alabi
Submitted to ICLR, 2027 TPDP 2026 and ICML Workshop on Hypothesis Testing 2026 arXiv
Scalable Multiterminal Key Agreement via Error-Correcting Codes Benjamin D. Kim, Daniel Alabi, Lav R. Varshney
IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2026 arXiv
Revisiting the Interface between Error and Erasure Correction in Wireless Standards
Vipindev Adat Vasudevan, Homa Esfahanizadeh, Benjamin D. Kim, Laura Landon, Alejandro Cohen, Muriel Médard
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), 2026 arXiv
An Efficient Hybrid Key Exchange Mechanism Benjamin D. Kim, Vipindev Adat Vasudevan, Alejandro Cohen, Rafael G. L. D'Oliveira, Thomas Stahlbuhk, Muriel Médard
IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2025 arXiv
On the Benefits of Coding for Network Slicing
Homa Esfahanizadeh, Vipindev Adat Vasudevan, Benjamin D. Kim, Shruti Siva, Jennifer Kim, Alejandro Cohen, Muriel Médard
IEEE ICC Workshops, 2024 arXiv
CRYPTO-MINE: Cryptanalysis via Mutual Information Neural Estimation Benjamin D. Kim, Vipindev Adat Vasudevan, Jongchan Woo, Alejandro Cohen, Rafael G. L. D'Oliveira, Thomas Stahlbuhk, Muriel Médard
IEEE ICASSP, 2024 arXiv
Cryptanalysis via Machine Learning Based Information-Theoretic Metrics Benjamin D. Kim, Vipindev Adat Vasudevan, Rafael G. L. D'Oliveira, Alejandro Cohen, Thomas Stahlbuhk, Muriel Médard
Preprint, 2025 arXiv
Leveraging AES Padding: dBs for Nothing and FEC for Free in IoT Systems
Jongchan Woo, Vipindev Adat Vasudevan, Benjamin D. Kim, Rafael G. L. D'Oliveira, Alejandro Cohen, Thomas Stahlbuhk, Ken R. Duffy, Muriel Médard
Preprint, 2024 arXiv
CERMET: Coding for Energy Reduction with Multiple Encryption Techniques - It's easy being green
Jongchan Woo, Vipindev Adat Vasudevan, Benjamin D. Kim, Rafael G. L. D'Oliveira, Alejandro Cohen, Thomas Stahlbuhk, Muriel Médard
Preprint, 2023 arXiv
Awards and Fellowships
MIT Irwin Mark Jacobs and Joan Klein Jacobs Presidential Fellowship - Mar. 2026
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship - Apr. 2025
Edward C. Jordan Award - Apr. 2025
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Finalist - Jan. 2025
