Farinaz Koushanfar

Farinaz Koushanfar is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California San Diego (UCSD). She holds the Siavouche Nemat-Nasser Endowed Chair and serves as Founding Co-Director of the Center for Machine-Intelligence, Computing and Security. Her affiliations include NSF Trust-Hub (Co-PI) and NSF TILOS AI Institute. She also serves on the Editorial Board of The Proceedings of the IEEE.

Research Focus: Prof. Koushanfar leads research in secure and efficient computing, including robust/safe AI, hardware/system security, AI-based optimization, and cryptographically secure privacy-preserving computing. Her work pioneered logic obfuscation/locking for chip security, automated co-design of AI systems, watermarking/tracing of deep learning models, and physical proofs of provenance. She explores co-design with cryptographic constructs for privacy preservation and manages nonlinearities in ciphertext domains.

Article Trends: Recent publications show expertise in neural watermarking (deepfakes, media authentication), zero-knowledge proof frameworks, Trojan attack defenses in ML models, secure federated learning, and hardware acceleration of cryptographic protocols. Her work combines machine learning, cryptography, and physical design security across 2022-2025 publications.

• Scientific Awards:
  • Fellow of ACM
  • Fellow of IEEE
  • Fellow of National Academy of Inventors (NAI)
  • Fellow of Kavli Foundation of NAS
  • Inducted to NAI 2024 Fellows

Advising & Leadership: She has advised multiple PhD students who became faculty at top universities (e.g., Stanford, Purdue). She chairs conferences like ACM WiSec 2024 and co-led the NSF SaTC decadal review. Her lab (ACES Lab) produces award-winning graduates like Bita Rouhani (DAC Under-40 Innovators) and Shehzeen Hussain (UCSD Best Dissertation Award).