CS Colloquium: Shafkat Islam - Towards Robust and Secure AI Agents in Open World
CS Colloquium: Shafkat Islam - Towards Robust and Secure AI Agents in Open World
CS Colloquium: Shafkat Islam “Towards Robust and Secure AI Agents in Open World”
Speaker Shafkat Islam
Thursday April 30th 2026
3-4pm
Lawson 3102AB
Host: Bharat Bhargava
Title: Towards Robust and Secure AI Agents in Open World
Abstract: As we enter a transformative era driven by artificial intelligence (AI)-based agents, my research addresses critical challenges at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. My work focuses on developing secure and robust AI agents to tackle emerging cyber threats in open-world environments, ensuring they remain resilient and trustworthy under adversarial conditions. In this talk, I will present how my research addresses these challenges by (i) developing an environment-agnostic and evidence-based framework to analyze the robustness of deep reinforcement learning agents in an open-world environment, (ii) understanding the impact of reasoning path hijacking and triggerless backdoor attacks and its mitigation strategy for a team of AI agents, and (iii) the design of orchestration and monitoring mechanisms for resilient and fault-tolerant computation in heterogeneous computing platforms.
Bio: Shafkat Islam is an assistant professor and the director of Trustworthy, Robust & Secure Intelligent Systems (Trust-It) lab in the computer science department at Purdue University Northwest. He completed PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University West Lafayette. He is broadly interested in cybersecurity, AI, and edge security. His research focuses on developing robust and trustworthy AI agents and safeguarding critical infrastructures/systems when AI agents are integrated into traditional systems. His research outcomes have been published in venues such as IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Network, IEEE WoWMoM, IEEE LCN, IEEE ISGT NA, etc. He was awarded the Purdue Employee Merit Recognition Award in 2024 and recognized as an excellent reviewer by the IEEE Communications Society in 2023.