Bio/CV

Prof. Koushanfar’s CV can be found here (Last updated Aug 2024)

Farinaz Koushanfar is currently the Siavouche Nemat-Nasser Endowed Chair Professor in Jacobs School of Engineering (JSOE), and the Henry Booker Scholar Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). She is the founding co-director of the UCSD Center of Machine-Intelligence, Computing, and Security (MICS), and a research scientist at Chainlink Labs. Prof. Koushanfar received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) as well as her MA in Machine Learning & Statistics both from UC Berkeley, an MS in ECE from UCLA, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. After finishing her PhD, Prof. Koushanfar was an assistant, associate, and full professor at William Marsh Rice University, where she spent 9 years before moving to UCSD in 2016.

Prof. Koushanfar’s current research addresses several aspects of secure and efficient computing, with a focus on robust machine learning under resource constraints, hardware and system security, AI-based optimization, intellectual property (IP) protection, as well as cryptographically secure privacy-preserving computing. Her research has made foundational contributions to all of these domains, including invention of the concepts of logic obfuscation/logic locking for both sequential and combinational logic that enabled the first active unique control of chips post-silicon, novel statistical methods for assessing chip security, the first automated co-design of data/algorithm/software/hardware for energy efficient and compact deep learning, invention of co-design methods for creation of low overhead robust and safe AI, the first trigger inversion methodology for detection of AI poisoning attack, creation of the first method for watermarking/ tracing deep learning models and generative output and attestation on trusted platforms, AI-based generic solvers for combinatorial optimization with constraints, creation of physical proofs of provenance, as well as novel co-design and optimization of algorithm and hardware/software, including co-design with cryptographic constructs for privacy preserving computing. 

Her work has linked seemingly disparate fields of logic synthesis and cryptographically secure computing requiring Boolean logic/vector computing, creating many new opportunities for researchers and leading to practical methods for managing function nonlinearities in ciphertext domain.

Professor Koushanfar has published 250+ refereed journal articles and/or conference papers in selective venues across security, design automation, and machine learning. Her projects have been supported by several National/DoD/information funding agencies as well as corporations. She has 25+ issued patents and several pending. Prof. Koushanfar has served on many editorial boards and technical program committees (TPCs). including the editorial board of the Proceedings of IEEE, Founder of the DAC Security subcommittee, NDSS'21/22 TPC Chair, and WiSEC'24 TPC Chair.

She has received a number of awards and honors including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award, Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge Award, MIT Technology Review TR-35, Qualcomm Innovation Awards, Intel Collaborative Awards, Young Faculty/CAREER Awards from NSF, DARPA, ONR and ARO, as well as several best paper awards including 7 articles selected to the Top Picks in hardware and embedded systems security, and the ICCAD 10 years perspective most influential paper award. Dr. Koushanfar is a fellow of ACM, IEEE, and the Kavli Frontiers of the National Academy of Sciences.

Prof. Koushanfar has a strong track record in mentoring star students and younger faculty. Under her co-leadership, UCSD MICS is the most gender-balanced engineering research center in the world. She has thus far graduated equal number of women and men PhDs. The alumni from her group have gone to leadership positions at top institutions and industrial research labs including Stanford, Purdue, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA AI Research, Microsoft Research, and Amazon AI.

Shorter bio for seminar talks:

Farinaz Koushanfar is the Siavouche Nemati-Nasser Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where she is the founding co-director of the UCSD Center for Machine-Intelligence, Computing & Security (MICS). She is also a research scientist at Chainlink Labs. Her research addresses several aspects of secure and efficient computing, with a focus on robust machine learning under resource constraints, AI-based optimization, hardware and system security, intellectual property (IP) protection, as well as privacy-preserving computing. Dr. Koushanfar has received a number of awards and honors including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award, Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge Award, MIT Technology Review TR-35, Qualcomm Innovation Awards, Intel Collaborative Awards, Young Faculty/CAREER Awards from NSF, DARPA, ONR and ARO, as well as several best paper awards. Dr. Koushanfar is a fellow of ACM, IEEE, and the Kavli Frontiers of the National Academy of Sciences.