Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at George Mason University's College of Engineering and Computing. He leads the HArt (Hardware and AI Research) Group, focusing on cutting-edge research at the intersection of hardware security and artificial intelligence. His educational journey includes a BTech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (2010), an MTech in Information Technology from International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (2012), and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2015). Following his doctoral studies, he completed post-doctoral research at TU Wien, Vienna (2015-2017) and George Mason University (2017-2018). Dr. Dinakarrao's research spans hardware security, adversarial machine learning, IoT networks, and deep learning in resource-constrained environments. His work integrates hardware design with AI techniques to address security challenges in computing systems, with particular focus on side-channel attack detection, malware detection in IoT networks, on-chip security, and hardware accelerator design for machine learning applications. His research has resulted in numerous publications in top-tier conferences and journals including IEEE Transactions, ACM conferences, and Design Automation Conference. Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong trend toward hardware security solutions using machine learning techniques. His work increasingly focuses on Processing-in-Memory architectures, energy-efficient security solutions for IoT devices, and innovative approaches to hardware Trojan detection. Many publications demonstrate interdisciplinary collaboration across electrical engineering, computer science, and cybersecurity domains. Young Research Fellow Award at Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2013 Best paper award at International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 2019 Best paper award at International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) 2020 Best paper nomination at International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) 2019 Best paper nomination at Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) 2018 Dr. Dinakarrao has successfully mentored numerous PhD and MS students, with alumni securing positions at AMD-Xilinx, US Government agencies, and academic institutions. His research has been supported by significant grants from NSF, DARPA, and Virginia Commonwealth Cyber Initiative. Current projects include securing supply chains with UVA, developing novel architectures for machine learning acceleration, and creating energy-preserving cryptography protocols. The HArt Group maintains active collaborations with industry partners including AMD-Xilinx and government agencies. The lab focuses on practical implementations of theoretical security concepts, with particular emphasis on creating deployable security solutions for real-world hardware systems. Current research directions include intermittent computing with energy harvesting, hardware fuzzing techniques, and robust machine learning models resistant to adversarial attacks.
