Anantaa Kotal

Anantaa Kotal is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), commencing her position in Fall 2024. Previously, she completed her PhD at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and gained industry experience at Amazon and IBM.

Her academic credentials include:

• PhD in Computer Science, University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), 2024
• B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, 2017

Dr. Kotal's research centers on Generative AI applications for privacy and security, with emphasis on privacy-preserving data sharing, synthetic data generation, and policy compliance verification. She integrates knowledge graphs, reinforcement learning, and neurosymbolic approaches to develop frameworks for secure data synthesis in healthcare, agriculture, and cybersecurity domains. Her work addresses critical challenges like policy ambiguity resolution and trustworthy AI code generation.

Analysis of her 15 most recent publications (2021-2025) reveals a strong trajectory toward knowledge-infused generative models for privacy preservation, with increasing focus on large language models (LLMs) and real-world applications in distributed systems. Key thematic clusters include policy-aware data synthesis (12 publications), healthcare data security (7 publications), and knowledge-graph-enhanced cybersecurity (5 publications).

Dr. Kotal is actively recruiting graduate students for her research lab at UTEP and currently teaches Data Mining (CS 5362/6362) in Fall 2024. She maintains active research collaborations with her doctoral advisor Dr. Anupam Joshi at UMBC and industry partners including IBM.

She leads a research laboratory at UTEP focused on developing next-generation privacy-preserving AI systems, with current projects spanning healthcare data anonymization, agricultural data sharing frameworks, and policy-compliant synthetic data generation for cybersecurity applications.