Google Dissertation Winner

Rodrigo Augusto Dos Santos is one of 10 students nationwide to win a Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions Google Dissertation Award.

Dos Santos, a doctoral candidate in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, is focused on neural networks and how they can be used for safety-related sound detection. Services like Alexa and Nest can detect such sounds and are becoming ubiquitous in security frameworks for that reason. But they also make extensive use of neural networks, which are vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks. Dos Santos' research involves attacking these networks to find security flaws and shoring them up to make the services using them less susceptible to hacking.

"It's very clear that neural networks have lots of vulnerabilities, and until those are reasonably dealt with we won't fully realize their potential on actual practical applications,” he says. “I hope I can somehow contribute to the rise of the next generation of researchers in this area."