Panagiota Kiourti
I am a 6th-year PhD student in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. I am a member of the Dependable Computing Laboratory, where I work with professor Wenchao Li. My research is primarily on the Security and Explainability of Deep Learning and developing methods to investigate vulnerabilities of Deep Learning models and defend against them.
I earned my undergraduate degree from the ECE department of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, where I completed my thesis under Professor Theodora Vargarigou.
The correct pronunciation of my name is Pah-nah-yo-tah, but you may call me Penny.
Research Interests
Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Explainable AI, Security, Reinforcement Learning
Publications
ACSAC'21MISA: Online Defense of Trojaned Models using Misattributions
Panagiota Kiourti, Wenchao Li, Anirban Roy, Karan Sikka, Susmit Jha
Our paper is a comprehensive defense that detects different types of backdoor triggers present on the input image without making any assumptions on knowing the trigger type beforehand. The detection mechanism is applied during inference and utilizes explainable AI techniques in the input or feature space.
DAC'20 TrojDRL: Evaluation of Backdoor Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning
Panagiota Kiourti, Kacper Wargeda, Susmit Jha, Wenchao Li
Covered by the WIRED Magazine
Nov 2019
Our paper is the first to introduce backdoor attacks in Reinforcement Learning with a simple intuitive and successful approach aligned with the requirements of backdoor attacks in the classification setting. Our results show that Reinforcement learning agents perform poorly as soon as the attack is present while returning to state-of-the-art performance after the attack. The attack is portrayed as a perturbation in one of the input image frames provided to the neural network policy.
Teaching Assistance Experience
Teaching Assistant in Cybersecurity (EC521)
Manuel Egele, BU, Spring 2020
Provided Office Hours, prepared & graded quizes, exams. Occasionally taught lectures.
Teaching Assistant in Operating Systems (EC440)
Manuel Egele, BU, Fall 2019
Provided Office Hours, prepared & graded quizes, exams. Occasionally led lab sessions.