Ying-Dar Lin is President of the National Institute of Cyber Security (NICS) and a Chair Professor of Computer Science at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan.

He received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from National Taiwan University in 1988 and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1993.

He was a visiting scholar at Cisco Systems in San Jose during 2007–2008, CEO of Telecom Technology Center, Taiwan, during 2010–2011, and Vice President of National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs), Taiwan, during 2017–2018.

He co-founded L7 Networks Inc. in 2002, which was later acquired by D-Link Corporation. He also founded and directed the Network Benchmarking Lab (NBL) starting in 2002. The lab evaluates network products using real traffic and automated tools, is an approved test lab of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), and later spun off O’Prueba Inc. in 2018.

His recent research interests include machine learning for cybersecurity, wireless communications, network softwarization, and mobile edge computing. His work on multi-hop cellular systems was pioneering in this area, has been cited over 1,000 times, and has been standardized into IEEE 802.11s, IEEE 802.15.5, IEEE 802.16j, and 3GPP.

He is an IEEE Fellow (class of 2013), IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2014–2017), and ONF Research Associate (2014–2018). He received the K. T. Li Breakthrough Award in 2017, as well as Research Excellence Awards in 2017 and 2020.

He has served or is serving on the editorial boards of several IEEE journals and magazines, including as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (COMST), where the impact factor increased from 9.22 to 25.249 during his term from 2017 to 2020.

He also co-authored the textbook Computer Networks: An Open Source Approach with Ren-Hung Hwang and Fred Baker (McGraw-Hill, 2011).