About me
I am a Ph.D. student @ Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah. I am jointly advised by Dr. Daniel Brown in the ARIA Lab, & Dr. Guanhong Tao in the SaLT Lab.
My research focuses on machine learning security and robustness at the intersection of generative AI and robotics. I currently work on securing autonomous and robotic systems by uncovering and mitigating vulnerabilities in learning-based control and decision-making, particularly using reinforcement learning and Transformer-based models. I also explore the robustness and trustworthiness of generative models built on modern Transformer architectures.
Ultimately, my goal is to uncover both vulnerabilities and defenses in AI systems, and to promote more robust, secure, and thoughtful model development as the field advances.
I received my M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Mississippi, under the supervision of Dr. Charles Walter @ the SPARC Lab, where I focused on exploiting the vulnerabilities and of the state-of-the-art object detection models to develop generalizable adversarial attacks.
Publications
Generalized Loss-Function-Based Attacks for Object Detection Models - Soumil Datta, and Charles Walter. Proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2025 (Nominated for Best Paper)
EllipScape: A Genetic Algorithm Based Approach to Non-Photorealistic Colored Image Reconstruction for Evolutionary Art - Soumil Datta, and Charles Walter. Proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2024 (Best Paper Award, Top 1%)
Awards & Honors
- HICSS 2024 Conference Best Paper Award, Jan 2024
- SAP Computer Science Award, Sep 2023
- Marcus Elvis Taylor Memorial Medal, April 2022
- Outstanding Student in Computer Science Award, Mar 2021