Graduate student selected for NSF fellowship
Komal Ilyas in the computer science and engineering department was awarded a prestigious fellowship to support her pursuit of a Ph.D. in computer science.
Komal Ilyas, a first-year doctoral student in the computer science and engineering department at Texas A&M University, is exploring the emerging field of adversarial machine learning.
“This field addresses how machine learning systems — such as autonomous vehicles or facial recognition — can be deceived or exploited,” Ilyas said.
Komal Ilyas, NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Graduate Program (NSF CSGrad4Us) fellow.
She was accepted into the prestigious National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program (NSF CSGrad4Us) to pursue this interest. NSF CSGrad4Us fellowships, through a partnership with the Computing Research Association, support domestic graduate students seeking careers in computer and information science and engineering fields. Fellows receive a $37,000 stipend and a $16,000 per year cost-of-education allowance for three years.
“As AI becomes more integrated into our daily lives and critical systems, understanding its vulnerabilities is essential,” Ilyas said. “I’ll be focusing on identifying how AI can be deceived or attacked so we can build more secure and trustworthy systems.”
Ilyas completed her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore in Pakistan and holds a master’s degree in computer science from Texas A&M. She applied for the NSF CSGrad4Us fellowship in the final year of her master’s program.
In addition to receiving funding, NSF CSGrad4Us fellows participate in a year-long mentorship program. Ilyas’ mentor helped her navigate the application process and select a doctoral program. Mentors also help fellows clarify their reason for pursuing a Ph.D.
“‘Why do you want to pursue a Ph.D.?’ It’s perhaps the most critical question for any aspiring doctoral researcher,” Ilyas said. “For me, the answer was clear from the beginning. I wanted not only the depth of knowledge, but the ability to contribute original research that addresses real-world security challenges.”
Now Ilyas has a semester of her program behind her. While continuing her cybersecurity research, she has begun exploring biomedical signal processing in the health care domain. Her faculty advisors are Dr. Nitesh Saxena — professor of computer science and engineering and associate director of the Global Cyber Research Institute — and Dr. Irfan Khan, assistant professor of marine engineering technology at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Ilyas also works in Saxena’s Security and Privacy In Emerging computing and networking Systems (SPIES) lab.
Currently, she is conducting background research for a review paper that explores adversarial attacks on maritime autonomous vehicles — unmanned marine vessels — with the goal of creating a classification system for the types of attacks and the defenses against them.
