Sierra Wyllie

Sierra Wyllie

Student of Engineering Science at the University of Toronto

University of Toronto Engineering Science

CleverHans Lab

Biography

I am a fourth year engineering science student at the University of Toronto. I work on fairness and trustworthy ML research as a member of the CleverHans Lab under Nicolas Papernot at the University of Toronto and Vector Institute. Currently, I am applying for graduate school, please reach out if interested!

Download my CV.

Interests
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Trustworthy Machine Learning
Education

  • BaSC in Engineering Science - Machine Learning, 2025

    University of Toronto

  • HS Diploma, 2020

    Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science

  • HS Diploma, 2020

    Henry Clay High School Liberal Arts Academy

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Research Intern
EPFL SPRING Lab
May 2024 – Aug 2025 Lausanne, Switzerland
Investigating privacy and harms in machine learning systems, mentored by Prof. Carmela Troncoso in the Security and Privacy Engineering (SPRING) lab.
 
 
 
 
 
Research Intern
University of Toronto CleverHans Lab
May 2021 – Present Toronto, Canada
Investigating fairness in machine learning, mentored by Prof. Nicolas Papernot in the CleverHans trustworthy machine learning lab.
 
 
 
 
 
Intern
OECD (Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development) Task Force on AI Compute and Climate
Jun 2022 – Aug 2022 Paris, France (Remote)
Worked as a technical intern with the OECD Expert Group on AI Compute and Climate with world leaders in AI, AI compute, and international policy. Developed frameworks to accurately explain importance of AI compute in national development.
 
 
 
 
 
Electrical and Software Engineering Intern
Space Tango
Jun 2020 – Aug 2020 Lexington, KY, USA
Assembled electrical components currently aboard the International Space Station for client R&D projects. Introduced artificially intelligent and autonomous solutions including UIs, fluid detection and direction tracking, and phase microscopy.
 
 
 
 
 
Research Student
Western Kentucky University
Jan 2018 – May 2020 Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA
Built classification system using ML in sci-kit Python on CICIDS-2017 dataset. Presented at regional conferences, such as ACM Mid-Southeast, and won best undergraduate poster. Also conducted a survey of metaheuristics for load balancing in WKU Cloud Lab’s Bioinformatics Cloud. Presented at WKU Student Reach Conference in March 2019.

Recent Publications

Sierra Wyllie, Ilia Shumailov, Nicolas Papernot (2024). Fairness Feedback Loops: Training on Synthetic Data Amplifies Bias. In FAccT'24.

Cite Paper

Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, Sierra Wyllie, Nicholas Franzese, Natalie Dullerud, Sébastien Gambs, Nicolas Papernot, Xiao Wang, Adrian Weller (2023). Confidential-PROFITT: Confidential PROof of FaIr Training of Trees. In ICLR'23.

Cite Paper

Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, Mohammad Yaghini, Natalie Dullerud, Sierra Wyllie, Ulrich Aïvodji, Aisha Alaagib, Sébastien Gambs, Nicolas Papernot (2022). Washing The Unwashable : On The (Im)possibility of Fairwashing Detection. In NeurIPS'22.

Cite