Team of University of Surrey

Prof. Nishanth Sastry is Associate Head of School for Research and Innovation in the School of CSEE, and leads the Networked Systems Theme within the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security. He is also a Surrey AI Fellow and co-leads the Pan University Surrey Security Network. Nationally, he is a member  of several advisory bodies including the College of Experts advising the  Chief Scientific Advisor of the UK Government's Department of Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT) College of Experts, the REF 2029 sub-panel for Computer Science and Informatics (UoA 11), the EPSRC Digital Security and Resilience Strategic Advisory Team and the EPSRC Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Skills Strategic Advisory Network. He is an ACM Distinguished Speaker and co-leads the Social Data Science Interest Group at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI. His work spans a number of topics related to social media and computer networking, including content delivery, LEO Satellite Networks, web privacy and online harms. Prof. Sastry holds a Bachelor’s degree (with distinction) from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore University, a Master’s degree from University of Texas, Austin, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, all in Computer Science. Previously, he spent over six years in the Industry (Cisco Systems, India and IBM Software Group, USA) and Industrial Research Labs (IBM TJ Watson Research Center). He has also spent time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and AI Laboratory. His honours include a "Best of Computer Communications Review" recognition in 2025, a Best Paper Award at SIGCOMM Mobile Edge Computing in 2017, a Best Paper Honorable Mention at WWW 2018, and, in a past life, a Best Student Paper Award at the Computer Society of India Annual Convention, a Yunus Innovation Challenge Award at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology IDEAS Competition, a Benefactor’s Scholarship from St. John’s College, Cambridge, a Best Undergraduate Project Award from RV College of Engineering, a Cisco Achievement Program Award and several awards from IBM. He has been granted nine patents in the USA for work done at IBM. Nishanth has been a keynote speaker, and received media coverage from print media such as The Times UK, New York Times, New Scientist and Nature, as well as Television media such as BBC, Al Jazeera and Sky News. 

Dr Xilu Wang is a Surrey Future Fellow with the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Surrey, Guildford, U.K. She received the B.Sc. degree from Harbin Institute of Technology (China) in 2016, the M.Sc. degree from Xidian University (China) in 2018, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Surrey (U.K.) in 2022. Her research interests include multi-objective optimisation, surrogate-assisted evolutionary optimisation, Bayesian optimisation, fair and federated optimisation, and evolutionary machine learning. Within the THUNDER project, she contributes methodological work on Neural Architecture Search and model compression, developing optimisation-driven approaches for efficient automated model design.