Ben Zhao is a Professor at the Computer Science department, U. C. Santa Barbara. He completed his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley (2000, 2004), and his B.S. from Yale (1997). He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation's CAREER award, MIT Technology Review's TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35), ComputerWorld Magazine's Top 40 Technology Innovators award, Google Faculty awards, the IEEE ITC Early Career Award, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. His work has been covered by numerous media outlets such as New York Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, New Scientist, MIT Tech Review, and Slashdot. He has published over 130 publications in areas of security and privacy, networked and distributed systems, wireless networks, data-intensive computing and HCI, with more than 20,000 citations (H-index 54). Finally, he has chaired a number of conferences (WOSN, WWW OSN track, IPTPS, IEEE P2P), and the World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016). He is a co-founder and on the steering committee of the ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN).