About
I am Hao Ren, a second-year PhD student at the University of Utah, supervised by Prof. Jun Xu. My research centers on software security and reverse engineering. More recently, I have been exploring the intersection of AI/LLMs and classical security techniques, aiming to enhance traditional approaches with modern machine learning.
Goal of this blog
I see this blog serving two main purposes:
Knowledge Base. This is where I keep notes on papers I read, interesting projects I discover, and ideas worth revisiting. In the age of AI, exhaustive technical documentation is not always the most valuable thing to write. Instead, I prefer to focus on the high-level ideas: the core workflow of a paper, how it connects to related work, and the strengths and limitations that become clear through comparison.
Project Notes. Before the LLM era, many of my side projects would stall at about 90% completion and never quite become polished, usable, or public. AI has made it much easier for individuals to build things from scratch, but more importantly for me, it helps close that last gap: finishing, checking, and shipping projects that might otherwise have remained unfinished. I also think projects are a better way to demonstrate a real understanding of a field, because they show not just knowledge itself, but the ability to integrate and apply it.