Thomas Vakili

Teacher at Stockholm University

I am a university teacher at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. The focus of my research is privacy-preserving techniques in natural language processing.

I have a PhD in computer science and natural language processing, and I defended my thesis in January 2026. I have an engineering background and worked in the tech industry as an IT consultant before starting my PhD, primarily as a back-end developer and data engineer.

Picture of Thomas at DSV in the NOD building in Kista.

Research

My research is focused on examining the extent to which LLMs leak information about their training data — and how to mitigate these risks. This includes exploring different attacks, such as training data extraction attacks and membership inference attacks. I have also conducted experiments on how automatic de-identification and data synthetization impact data utility for machine learning purposes.

In addition to these privacy-oriented research interests, I am also very excited by research in NLP for under-resourced languages, bias in machine learning, NLP for the social sciences, and clinical NLP.

Teaching

I teach several courses and I also supervise bachelor's and master's theses. I am teaching or have taught in the following courses: