Ph.D. in Computer Science, INSA Lyon & iExec Blockchain Tech, Lyon
Jan. 2022 – June 2025
Thesis: Trustworthy Collaborative Learning: Personalization, Privacy, and Robustness at the Edge
Advisor: Dr. Sonia Ben Mokhtar
M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Western Brittany, Brest
Sep. 2019 – Sep. 2021
Specialization: Intelligent, Interactive, and Autonomous Systems
B.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene (USTHB), Algiers
Sep. 2015 – June 2018
Track: Academic Computer Science
Programming: Python, C++, CUDA, Java
Machine Learning Frameworks: PyTorch, Scikit-Learn
Privacy-Enhancing Technologies: Differential Privacy (Tensorflow Privacy, DP-SGD)
Collaboration Tools: Git, Docker, Weights & Biases
Yacine Belal, Mohamed Maouche, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Anthony Simonet-Boulogne. (2025). "Inferring Communities of Interest in Collaborative Learning-based Recommender Systems." IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). To appear.
Sonal Yadav, Yacine Belal, Brent Lagesse, Afra Mashhadi. (2025). "Benchmarking Clustered Federated Learning Algorithms for Next-Point Prediction." IEEE DCOSS-IoT. To appear.
Yacine Belal, Mohamed Maouche, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Anthony Simonet-Boulogne. (2025). "GRANITE: a Byzantine-Resilient Dynamic Gossip Learning Framework." arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.17471.
Ousmane Touat, Jezekael Brunon, Yacine Belal, Julien Nicolas, Mohamed Maouche, César Sabater, Sonia Ben Mokhtar. (2024). "Scrutinizing the Vulnerability of Decentralized Learning to Membership Inference Attacks." arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.12837.
Yacine Belal, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Hamed Haddadi, Jaron Wang, Afra Mashhadi. (2024). "Survey of Federated Learning Models for Spatial-Temporal Mobility Applications." ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, 10(3), 1–39.
Yacine Belal, Aurélien Bellet, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Vlad Nitu. (2022). "PEPPER." Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol., 6(3), 101:1–101:27.
Talk at PEPR Cybersécurité Winter School, Autrans, France
Talk at PEPR IA Workshop, Grenoble, France
Talk at Atelier sur la Protection de la Vie Privée (APVP) 2023, Besançon, France
Talk at IMWUT / UbiComp 2022, Cambridge, UK