Computer & information science & engineering (cise) department

Bonnie Dorr

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Lab Director & Professor

Dr. Dorr’s research focuses on deep language understanding, semantics, language processing using linguistically informed machine learning models, large-scale multilingual processing, explainable artificial intelligence (AI), social computing, and detection of underlying mental states.

As PI and co-PI on IARPA CAUSE, DARPA Social Sim, DARPA ASED, and DARPA INCAS, her contributions have fallen squarely in the realm of cyber-NLP, for example, responding to social engineering attacks and detecting indicators of influence. She has an affiliate appointment at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, is Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland, and is former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), overseeing human language technology programs, including Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT), Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT), Multilingual Automatic Document Classification, Analysis, and Translation (MADCAT), and Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech (RATS).

Sara Rampazzi

Assistant Professor and Lab Director

Dr. Sara Rampazzi is the director of the CSPSec laboratory, which investigates hardware and software vulnerabilities and defensive designs against threats to the physics of hardware and sensing, as well as AI model security and human factors. Dr. Rampazzi made several key contributions to the security and privacy of Critical Infrastructure, Healthcare and Autonomous Transportation Systems, and the Internet of Everything. Her research has been published in top-tier security conferences, such as IEEE Security & Privacy, USENIX Security, and Network and DistributedSystem Security (NDSS) Symposium.Some of her works include defending underwater data centers from acoustic attacks, investigate autonomous systems vulnerabilities, medical devices security, and protecting portable IoTs devices from analog side-channels, including providing explainable models for security. For example, her research on injecting inaudible and invisible commands to smart home devices, phones, and tablets was the first study to discover the oversensing capability of MEMS microphones to capture invisible light as sound. Her work on vehicular LiDAR sensor spoofing attacks has been recognized by Forbes as the first vulnerability against LiDAR-based AI-based perception in autonomous driving frameworks. Her recent work on protecting emerging underwater datacenters from acoustic attacks has been awarded as “Best Paper” at the 16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems, for the cutting-edge new research directions and findings in this emerging security area. She has received the Medtronic Outstanding Research Contributor Recognition for her discovery of vulnerabilities in cardiac implantable electronic devices, and she is one of the finalists of the ISSNAF Mario Gerla Young Investigator Award 2021 for research in Computer Science. Her work is funded by NSF, ONR, Toyota InfoTech Lab, and Meta.

Sonja Schmer-Galunder

Professor of Practice, Glenn and Deborah Renwick Leadership Professor in AI and Ethics

Dr. Schmer-Galunder is a Social Anthropologist and Principal Research Scientist at Smart Information Flow Technologies. She has more than 14 years of experience in human domain research, in particular working at the intersection of social science and AI. She is the Principal Investigator on several multi-million-dollar DARPA-funded research projects that combine social science with AI development to better address long-term social and cultural impacts of AI. She was the PI of DARPA Understanding Group Bias, DARPA SBIRs TYBALT and MEDULLA OBLONGATA and she is currently PI on DARPA Civil Sanctuary and co-PI on DARPA HABITUS. Her research interests span social and ethical impact of AI, algorithmic bias, mis- and disinformation, the relationship between online discourse and offline behavior, anthropological methods for ML, and human performance. She also led several lunar surface operation simulation studies at the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) habitat and has been invited to present her research at academic conferences, NASA, Google and DARPA. Prior to working in industry, she worked as a researcher at Columbia University and New York University.

Joe Wilson

Associate Professor

“My interests are quite varied, but most of my current funded research is associated with the detection and remediation of land mines and other unexploded buried hazards.”

Dr. Wilson leads efforts to renew accreditation and designation of UF as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Research (CAE-R). This designation, which emphasizes graduate education and research in the following areas: Principles; Security Mechanisms/Functionality; Architectures; Assurance; Analysis; and Non-technical Information Assurance Issues – places UF in an elite group of universities that meet the federal government’s criteria for providing educational and research opportunities in cybersecurity. The CAE-R program is jointly sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). For more information about the CAE-R program, visit the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies.

Daisy Zhe Wang

Director of the Data Science Research (DSR) Lab & Arnold & Lisa Goldberg Rising Star Professor in Computer Science

Dr. Wang is particularly interested in bridging scalable data management and processing systems with probabilistic models and statistical methods . She currently pursues research topics such as probabilistic databases, probabilistic knowledge bases, large-scale inference engines, query-driven interactive machine learning, and crowd assisted machine learning. Prior to joining UF, she taught at University of California, Berkeley where she was a member of the Database Group and the AMP/RAD Lab. She received Google Faculty Award in 2014. Along with other co-authors, she received “10-Years Test-of-Time” Award for the 2018 VLDB paper on WebTables. She received Arno and Lisa Goldberg Rising Star Associate Professorship in 2019. She is inducted into the Senior Members of ACM in 2022. Her research is externally funded by NSF, NIH, DARPA, NIST, Google, Amazon, Pivotal, Greenplum/EMC, Adobe, DTCC, Sandia National Labs and Harris Corporation .