Shirin Nilizadeh, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Texas, at Arlington
Google Scholar
Research Lab website
Email: shirin dot nilizadeh at uta dot edu
Office: 500 UTA Blvd., ERB 530
Arlington, TX
Latest News
March 2024: Our paper "Users’ Behavioral and Emotional Response to Toxicity in Twitter Conversations" got accepted to ICWSM 2024. Kudos to Ana Aleksandric for leading this project.March 2024: Our paper on "From Chatbots to Phishbots?: Phishing Scam Generation in Commercial Large Language Models" got accepted to IEEE S&P 2024. Kudos to Sayak Saha Roy for leading this project and Poojitha Thota for her great contribution.
March 2024: Presented a talk on "Countering Harmful Content in the Digital Age" at the Greater Fort Worth Chapter of PRSA monthly luncheon.
Febuary 2024: Our IEEE Euro S&P'23 paper on Social Media Content Moderation was cited in two AMICUS CURIAE BRIEFs submitted to The Supreme Court.
Febuary 2024: Congratulations to my Ph.D. students for leading and participating in OurCS@DFW and SCRF. Undergraduate students in our PhishLLM workshop received the runner-up award for their presentation. Thanks Sayak Saha Roy and Poojitha Thota for teaching and mentoring the students with much care and patience. Additionally, Poojitha Thota and Sadegh Moosavi received the Honorable Mention award for their lightning talks and Mohit Singhal received the Honorable Mention award for his poster.
Febuary 2024: Our paper “Demonstration of an Adversarial Attack Against a Multimodal Vision Language Model for Pathology Imaging,” has been accepted to IEEE ISBI. Kudos to Poojitha Thota and Jai Prakash Veerla leading the project and thanks, Dr. Jacob M. Luber for initiating this collaboration.
January 2024: Co-chair of ASONAM's Multidisciplinary Track 2024.
December 2023: Serving on the program committee ACM CCS 2024, Security Usability and Measurement Track.
November 2023: Serving on the program committee of DIMVA 2024.
November 2023: Our paper "Analyzing the Stance of Facebook Posts on Abortion Considering State-level Health and Social Compositions" got accepted to ICWSM 2024. Great work by Ana Aleksandric who led this interdeciplinary project alongside public health experts.
November 2023: Serving on the program committee of The Web Conference 2024- Web4Good.
November 2023: Participated as a penlist at The 9th Annual Research Integrity Symposium: Research and Education in the Al Era to discuss "AI IMPACTS ON RESEARCH: ADVANTAGES AND CHALLENGES."
October 2023: Presented a talk on "Applications of Social Media Analysis and AI for Social Good" in SOCW 6328: Social Welfare, Policy, and Research course by the School of Social Work at UTA.
October 2023: Presented our paper, “Phishing in the Free Waters,” at ACM IMC 2023.
September 2023: Serving on the program committee of ICWSM 2024.
August 2023: Our paper “Phishing in the Free Waters: A Study of Phishing Attacks Created using Free Website Building Services” got accepted at ACM IMC 2023. Kudos to Sayak Saha Roy for leading this project.
July 2023: Our paper on "Unveiling the Risks of NFT Promotion Scams" was accepted at ICWSM 2024.
June 2023: My NSF CAREER Award was featured on UTA News.
June 2023: Our IEEE Euro S&P'23 paper on Social Media Content Moderation was citied in the official report submitted to The Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs in European Union.
May 2023: Received NSF CAREER Award for "CAREER: Advancing Adversarial Robustness of Natural Language Generation Systems." Thanks, NSF!
May 2023: Our paper on " Examining StyleGAN as a Utility-Preserving Face De-identification Method” is accepted to PETS 2023. Good work by Sadegh Moosavi.
April 2023: Ana Aleksandric's research project is featured on UTA News.
April 2023: Our project on social media analysis of security discussions has been featured on UTA News.
Teaching
Spring 2024: CSE 5388/6388: Special Topics in Advanced Information Security: Data-Driven Security and Privacy.
Fall 2023: CSE 4380/5380: Information Security 1
Spring 2023: CSE 5388/6388: Special Topics in Advanced Information Security: Data-Driven Security and Privacy.
Spring 2023: CSE 4380/ 5388: Information Security 1
Fall 2022: CSE 4380: Information Security 1
Spring 2022: CSE 4380: Information Security 1
Spring 2021: CSE 5388/6388: Special Topics in Advanced Information Security: Data-Driven Security and Privacy.
Spring 2021: CSE 4380/ 5388: Information Security 1
Fall 2020: CSE 4380: Information Security 1
Spring 2020: CSE 5388/6388: Special Topics in Advanced Information Security: Data-Driven Security and Privacy.
Fall 2019: CSE 4380: Information Security 1
Spring 2019: CSE 5388/6388: Special Topics in Advanced Information Security: Data-Driven Security and Privacy.
Fall 2018: CSE 4380/5380: Information Security
Bio
Dr. Shirin Nilizadeh is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. She received her Ph.D. in Security Informatics from Indiana University Bloomington (IUB). For her dissertation, she received a two-year fellowship from the School of Informatics and Computing at IUB. Following her doctorate, she held post-doctoral positions in CNets at IUB (2014-2015), in SecLab at UC Santa Barbara (2015-2017), and then in CyLab at CMU (2017-2018). Her research focuses on security and privacy in the context of systems and social networks using techniques from machine learning and big data analytics. She takes a highly interdisciplinary approach to her research, incorporating ideas from artificial intelligence, natural language processing, psychology, social sciences, public health, privacy, and system security. She is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2023) and the Comcast Innovation Award (2022). Her work has received the best paper awards at eCrime 2021. Her research has been covered by several news and technology outlets, such as WIRED, MIT Technology Review Germany, Yahoo! Finance, and Communications of the ACM, as well as cited by official reports submitted to The Supreme Court and the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs in European Union. She has served on numerous program committees of the most prestigious international conferences and workshops on computer security, privacy, web, and social media.