CIVS & CS Host Distinguished Speaker Seminar – Shafkat Islam

CIVS had the pleasure of co-sponsoring a Distinguished Speaker Seminar with the PNW CS department on November 14. Shafkat Islam, Ph.D., PNW Assistant Professor of Computer Science, presented “Towards Robust & Secure AI Agents in Open-World” to CIVS and PNW students, staff, and faculty. His talk was very well received and concluded with a productive Q&A session.

Ensuring secure and robust AI agents in open-world environments is vital to counter emerging cyber threats. This talk presents three research directions: (i) an environment-agnostic, evidence-based framework for assessing AI robustness, (ii) analysis and defense against triggerless backdoor attacks in federated learning, and (iii) orchestration and monitoring strategies for resilient, fault-tolerant computation in heterogeneous platforms.

About Shafkat Islam, Ph.D.

Shafkat Islam is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Trustworthy, Robust & Secure Intelligent Systems (Trust-It) lab within the Computer Science Department at Purdue University Northwest. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University West Lafayette. He has led multiple research projects with DARPA, Sandia National Laboratory, and NSF. His research outcomes have been published in IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence and IEEE Internet of Things Journal.