Farinaz Koushenfar, Professor and Henry Booker College Scholar in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD, has been selected as one of 57 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellows. Koushnvar was recognized for her contributions to secure computing and machine learning that sustains privacy.
The ACM Fellows Program recognizes the top 1% of ACM members for outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and for outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.
Koshanvar directs the Adaptive Computing and Embedded Systems (ACES) Lab at the University of California, San Diego. Work from her lab has transformed important areas of device-based security, secure AI, and privacy-preserving computing. Kushnefar is also the founding co-director of the Center for Machine Intelligence, Computing, and Security (MICS), an engineering think tank at the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering that focuses on technical innovation and the development of a diverse workforce by integrating hardware, software, AI algorithms, and data for scalable machine learning and security. .
“I am honored to be recognized with this esteemed class of ACM Fellows,” said Kochanfer. “I am very excited about the long-term prospects and potential societal impact of my work in security, privacy, and artificial intelligence. I am grateful for the privileges that the academic institutions where I have worked and taught at, and the larger scientific community, have afforded me throughout my research career. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to my mentors, collaborators, etc. Post-doctoral students and students for their support and unwavering contributions to our joint projects.”
Kochanfer’s original contributions to large-scale computing. Her research has resulted in widely used software and dozens of patents filed in the United States and around the world. Its landmark inventions ensure the security of digital integrated circuits (ICs) and their software/data, and the power of privacy-preserving artificial intelligence and computational models.
Created the first-ever methodology to lock, track, and control every post-integrated circuit manufacturing process. Koshanvar’s two recent patent-pending works outline state-of-the-art technology to address the challenging problem of cryptographically secure deep learning on encrypted data.
Koshanfar is also considered the inventor of the first hardware accelerator for secure and robust deep learning for adversarial samples, as well as the first powerful AI accelerator for data poisoning. She is the inventor of the first deep learning watermarking method which is simultaneously robust to several classes of previously known vulnerabilities. Kushnifar is also a prominent supporter of women and minorities and has led several International Development Initiative initiatives. Under her leadership (and in collaboration with the MICS Associate Director), both the UCSD ACES Lab and the MICS Center are now among the most gender-balanced engineering research groups in the world in terms of student and faculty members.
“The most important developments in computing are often the result of a combination of many individual contributions, which build on and complement each other,” ACM President Yiannis Ioannidis said in a statement. But each individual contribution is an essential link in the chain. The ACM Fellows Program is a way to recognize the women and men whose hard work and creativity happen unobtrusively but lead our field. In selecting a new class of ACM Fellows each year, we also hope that recognizing these leaders will inspire our broader members with visions for their work. “
Prior to being recognized by the ACM, Kochanfer’s influential publications have received several top paper awards at top conferences in their field. She has received many other honors and awards including being included in the 2008 MIT Technology Review (TR-35) among the world’s top 35 innovators under 35, 2010 President Obama Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama, 2019, rising to Awarded IEEE Fellow status, 10 Year Award for Most Influential Paper at the 2017 International Computer Aided Design Conference.
Kouchnefar now joins the diverse class of 2022 of ACM Fellows representing research centers, universities and private companies located in ten different countries around the world. Fellows are nominated by their peers, with nominations reviewed by a distinguished selection committee.