About Me

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida. I earned a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida, a M.S. in Computer Science from Clemson University, and a B.S. in Computer Science with a Minor in Mathematics from South Carolina State University. In 2018, I created the Cyber Identity and Behavior Research Lab (CIBeR) to conduct research on

• various aspects, including accessibility, of user authentication systems, especially on smart devices that are in everyday use;
• writing analysis, with specific emphasis on authorship;
• and human behavior analysis, with a special interest in applying these analyses outside of the field of computer science (e.g., health).

Our research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft AI for Health, The National Institute on Disability Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, and the University of South Florida.

I currently serve as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Biometrics Council Newsletter and Guest Editor for the MDPI Electronics Special Issue on Recent Advances in Biometric Security in IoT Based on Machine Learning. I am the co-organizer for the First and Second Workshops on Applied Multimodal Affect Recognition (AMAR 2020/2021). I have served on several conference organizing committees (International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications, and Systems (BTAS), International Conference on Biometrics (ICB), etc.). I was a recipient of the University of Florida Delores Auzenne Dissertation Award, National Science Foundation CyberCorps Scholarship for Service Fellowship, and am a 2021-2022 McKnight Junior Faculty Fellow.

Research Areas:

User Authentication, Authorship Attribution, Biometrics, Applied Machine Learning, Human Behavior Analysis