Thomas Vakili PhD Student

I am a university teacher at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences where . My research is about the intersection of natural language processing (NLP) and privacy.

The NLP and AI field has seen great advances through the introduction of large language models (LLMs), like BERT, Llama, and GPT-5. At DSV, we have successfully applied these language models for medical applications by training on large amounts of electronic health record data.

One of the main reasons for the success of these language models is that they are very large, and that they are trained on enormous corpora. Because of this, the success of these models comes with an important drawback: they have a tendency to leak information about their training data. My research tackles this issue, and my goal is to find ways of creating models that preserve the privacy of people in the training data.

I defended my licentiate thesis in May of 2023 and defended my doctoral dissertation in January of 2026. My supervisors were Professor Hercules Dalianis and Professor Aron Henriksson. You can read more about my research at my academic webpage.