I am an assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). My research is focused on studying current and emerging cybersecurity issues in online hate and offensiveness, security of AI/ML systems, and online privacy.

I received my Ph.D in CSE from the Unversity at Buffalo, SUNY in spring 2022, under the direction of Dr. Hongxin Hu. I have worked on various aspects of emerging cybersecurity threats such as cyberbullying, cyberharassment, online offensiveness, attacks and defenses of AI/ML models, and image privacy and security.

I am actively looking for self-motivated students (PhD/Master/Undergraduate/Intern) to conduct research in online hate and offensiveness, AI/ML security (adversarial attacks, robustness, interpretability/explainability, privacy, and backdoors), crowdsourcing, and social media mining. Interested students, please feel free to send me an email with your CV and transcript.

News

• [Paper] 12/2023: 🔥 Our paper titled "Image Safeguarding: Reasoning with Conditional Vision Language Model and Obfuscating Unsafe Content Counterfactually" has been accepted for publication at AAAI 2024. AAAI is a top Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference. Acceptance rate is 2342/9862 = 23.75%.
• [Paper] 10/2023: 🔥 Our paper titled "Moderating New Waves of Online Hate with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models" has been accepted for publication at IEEE S&P 2024 ("Oakland"). S&P is the top cyber security conference. Acceptance rate is 83/558 = 14.9%.
• [Media] 10/2023: I spoke to WIRED about how AI-generated CSAM has emerged as a critical issue. Matt Burgess's thorough investigation into this new problem unravels alarming details.
• [Service] 10/2023: We were honored to have Dr. Atreyi Kankanhalli's talk at UTSA's AT&T Distinguished Speaker Series. More details here.
• [Paper] 9/2023: Our paper titled "Understanding and Analyzing COVID-19-related Online Hate Propagation Through Hateful Memes Shared on Twitter" has been accepted for publication at ASONAM 2023.
• [Hiring Students] 7/2023: 📢 Raymond Choo and I are looking for highly motivated students (U.S. citizens or permanent residents) to recruit in fall 2023 to work on some critical projects involving CSAM and Generative AI. Email us if interested!
• [Service] 6/2023: I will be the colloquium coordinator for Fall 2023. This includes a series of talks by distinguished speakers and poster sessions for our PhD students. Get ready for some super interesting talks and poster sessions this fall!
• [Paper] 5/2023: 🔥 Our paper titled "Towards Targeted Obfuscation of Adversarial Unsafe Images using Purification and Counterfactual Super Region Attribution Explainability" has been accepted for publication at USENIX Security 2023, a top cybersecurity conference, known as a "Big-4" conference in cybersecurity.
• [Paper] 5/2023: 🔥 Our paper titled "Analysis of COVID-19 Offensive Tweets and Their Targets" has been accepted for publication at KDD 2023, a top AI/ML/Data Science venue. The acceptance rate is 25.37 percent or 184 out of 725
• [Paper] 5/2023: Our paper titled "COVID-19 and Sinophobia: Detecting Warning Signs of Radicalization on Twitter and Reddit" has been accepted for publication in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
• [Grant] 3/2023: I have recieved the NSF CRII award on addressing new waves of online hate
• 8/2022: I have joined UTSA as a tenured track assistant professor in the IS&CS department
• [Paper] 12/2021: One paper accepted at CODASPY 2022.
• [Service] 12/2021: I have been invited as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.
• [Media] 11/2021: Team Cacti Places 5th at Baidu Autodriving Capture the Flag Competition.

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• [Paper] 10/2021: One paper accepted at the Journal of Hate Studies.
• [Service] 10/2021: I will serve as a TPC member for ACSAC'21 Artifacts Evaluation Committee
• [Talk] 07/2021: I was invited as a guest speaker to give a talk on cyberbullying detection using deep learning at NC A&T State University on July 21st, 2021.
• [Service] 04/2021: I have been asked to serve as a sub-reviewer on DESRIST-2021 conference review committee.
• [Grant] 04/2021: Grant from Baylor University Research Committee ONE-URC Program (as Co-PI)
• [Media] 03/2021:Our work on image-based cyberbullying published at NDSS 2021 has been showcased on the UB CSE homepage

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• [Service] 02/2021: I will be serving on the program committee of ACHI 2021
• [Talk] 02/2021: I gave a talk on image-based cyberbullying at NDSS 2021 held in virtual format.
• [Paper] 01/2021: Our work on image-based cyberbullying has been accepted at NDSS 2021. The paper acceptance rate at NDSS at this year was 15.2 percent or 87 out of 573
• [Service] 01/2021: I will serve as a TPC member for CODASPY'21 Poster Program Committee
• [Service] 01/2020: I will be hosting the UB Cybersecurity Reading Group Meetings this semester (Spring 2021) at UB. We will discuss many interesting papers this semster on various fields of cybersecurity.