Online Threats and Cybercrime
Phishing, scams, cybercriminal communities, and security threats emerging across social-media and messaging platforms.
Security, Privacy, and Trustworthy AI
Shirin Nilizadeh, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The University of Texas at Arlington
Understanding emerging digital threats and designing trustworthy technologies for a safer digital world.
Research
My research examines the evolving interaction among people, artificial intelligence, and online ecosystems. I combine large-scale online-data analysis with cybersecurity, machine learning, and human-centered methods to identify emerging threats, understand their technical and societal consequences, and develop practical, trustworthy solutions.
Trustworthy AI and LLM Security
Adversarial robustness, misuse and safety of generative AI, reliable AI-assisted security systems, and multi-agent verification.
Online Safety and Human-Centered Security
Technology-facilitated abuse, harmful content, content moderation, user needs, and tools that support safer decision-making.
Privacy, Fairness, and Responsible Data Use
Visual privacy protection, fairness auditing, policy analysis, social-data privacy, and responsible deployment of data-driven technologies.
Recent Updates
Selected updates from the past year on publications, research, talks, and professional activities. Lab personnel news is maintained on the SPR Lab website.
July 2026
Received seed funding from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to launch a multidisciplinary collaboration among computer science, social work, and child-welfare practitioners to develop trustworthy AI for child-welfare investigations and decision support.
July 2026
Recognized by the Association for Computational Linguistics community for outstanding reviewing service.
June 2026
Three papers appeared at ACM AsiaCCS 2026: The Insider’s Advantage: Exploiting Automated Privacy Policy Analyzer Tools Through Subtle Text Manipulations, Unequal Privacy: Auditing Demographic Bias Vulnerabilities in Visual Protection Systems, and Taming Data Challenges in ML-based Security Tasks Using Generative AI.
May 2026
Our preprint, Context-Aware Spear Phishing: Generative AI-Enabled Attacks Against Individuals via Public Social Media Data, was covered by Help Net Security in the article “Public Instagram Posts Provide Raw Material for AI Phishing Campaigns.”.
April 2026
Our paper, “The Power of Social Norms: How Initial Responses to Toxicity Shape Conversations on Twitter,” was accepted to the CySoc workshop co-located with ICWSM 2026.
February 2026
The MAVS ETA clinic, an interdisciplinary collaboration between computer science and social work, reached more than 120 victim-service professionals and shelter residents through training and educational workshops, while also providing individualized technical assistance to survivors of technology-facilitated abuse.
January 2026
Our paper, Assessment of the Cultural Nuances in COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake Through a Comparative Analysis of English and Spanish Facebook Posts in Tarrant County, Texas: A Longitudinal Study, was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR).
October 2025
UTA highlighted the University’s designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research (CAE-R) through academic year 2030, following an institutional effort that I led.
August 2025
Our paper, PhishLang: A Real-Time, Fully Client-Side Phishing Detection Framework Using MobileBERT, was accepted to NDSS 2026.
August 2025
Our paper, DarkGram: A Large-Scale Analysis of Cybercriminal Activity Channels on Telegram, appeared at the USENIX Security Symposium 2025.
August 2025
Our technology-facilitated abuse research was covered by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Recent Professional Service
Selected program-committee, reviewing, and leadership activities from the past year.
- 2026–2027: Editorial Board / Program Committee, Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium and Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS/PoPETs 2027).
- 2026–2027: Senior Program Committee, International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2027).
- 2026: Program Committee, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS 2026).
- 2026: Program Committee, Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2026).
- 2026: Program Committee, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops 2026.
- 2026: Technical Program Committee, IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications (IEEE TPS 2026).
- 2025–2026: Reviewer, ACL Rolling Review, including recognition for outstanding reviewing service.
- 2026: NSF Human-Centered Computing review panelist and reviewer.
- 2025–2026: Led UTA’s successful effort to obtain the NSA Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research (CAE-R) designation and serve as institutional point of contact.
Teaching
- Spring 2026: CSE 4380/5380 — Information Security
- Spring 2025: CSE 5388/6388 — Data-Driven Security and Privacy
- Spring 2025, second eight-week session: CSE 6388 — Data-Driven Security and Privacy, Fort Worth program
- Fall 2024: CSE 4380/5380 — Information Security
- Spring 2024: CSE 5388/6388 — Data-Driven Security and Privacy
- Fall 2023: CSE 4380/5380 — Information Security
- Spring 2023: CSE 5388/6388 — Data-Driven Security and Privacy
Bio
Dr. Shirin Nilizadeh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The University of Texas at Arlington, where she directs the Security & Privacy Research Lab. Her research spans security and privacy, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, social computing, and human-centered online safety. She develops data-driven methods to understand emerging digital threats and trustworthy technologies to reduce real-world harms.
She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Comcast Innovation Award. Her work has received honors including the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Distinguished Paper Award and the APWG eCrime Best Paper Award. Her research has been featured by outlets including WIRED, MIT Technology Review, Communications of the ACM, and Orange’s Hello Future, and has been cited in policy and legal reports in the United States and European Union.