UC San Diego Electrical Engineering Professor Inducted Into National Academy of Inventors

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• Liezel Labios- [email protected]

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• Secure Computing
• Efficient Computing

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Farinaz Koushanfar, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego, has been elected to the 2024 Class of Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Koushanfar is among the 170 fellows announced by the NAI this year whose innovations are making significant tangible societal and economic impacts today and will well into the future. Election to NAI Fellow is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to academic inventors.

"I am thrilled, and also not surprised, that Farinaz Koushanfar has been selected for induction into the National Academy of Inventors. Farinaz works on problems in secure and efficient computational architecture that are both difficult and important. Her career as a researcher and educator has been innovative and the outputs have been wonderfully disruptive. This is the kind of work that produces inventions," said Albert P. Pisano, Dean of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and Special Adviser to the Chancellor. "Farinaz has been working way ahead of the cutting edge for a long time, and it's great to see her achievements being recognized by the NAI."

Koushanfar, who is the inaugural holder of the Siavouche Nemat-Nasser Endowed Chair and the founding co-director of the Center for Machine Intelligence, Computing and Security (MICS), is a leader in the design and optimization of secure and efficient computing systems. Her research has transformed the fields of hardware-based security, safe and secure AI, design automation and intellectual property (IP) protection, as well as cryptographically secure privacy-preserving computing.

She is recognized for inventing the first set of methods for actively and uniquely locking, tracking and controlling chips post-fabrication and in-field; a novel partitioned deep learning architecture; a hardware accelerator for safe deep learning robust to adversarial samples; an AI accelerator robust to data poisoning; and a deep learning watermarking method for tracking distributed models that is simultaneously robust to several classes of prior-known vulnerabilities. Koushanfar's notable contributions also include developing advanced AI on encrypted data through algorithm-cryptography co-optimization, a Zero-Knowledge-based method for AI model ownership proof, as well as innovating the first provably (cryptographically) private federated learning system resilient to data poisoning and backdoor attacks.

Koushanfar has a portfolio of 25 pending, provisional or granted U.S. and International patents. Her publications have received several best paper awards in top conferences in her field. She has received a number of honors and awards including being named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2022; elevation to the rank of fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Computer Engineers (IEEE); the Ten Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award at the 2017 International Conference on Computer Aided Design; the 2010 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama; and being listed in 2008 MIT Technology Review (TR-35) among the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35.

As part of the 2024 Class of NAI Fellows, Koushanfar will be honored at the NAI 14^th Annual Meeting on June 26, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia, where she will receive a medal presented by a senior official of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Learn more about research and education at UC San Diego in: Artificial Intelligence