About me
I am a Ph.D. candidate @ Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah. My main research interests are in the field of ML/AI security, trustworthiness, and efficiency. I work with Professor Guanhong Tao at the SaLT Lab. My primary motivation is to uncover vulnerabilities and aid in the development of models that are not only robust, secure, and transparent, but also efficiently designed.
During my Masters study at the University of Mississippi, I worked on my thesis under the guidance of Dr. Charles Walter, focusing on exploring the vulnerabilities and behavior of object detection models against adversarial attacks. I also developed and evaluated more efficient inference-time adversarial attacks for state-of-the-art object detector models.
In the past, I worked with Genetic Algorithms (GA) to explore optimizations, and created a GA based artistic reconstruction algorithm. Additionally, as part of my diverse research experiences, I was part of the Heterogeneous Research Lab (HEROES) where I researched on the development of a concurrent priority queue, as well as highly concurrent algorithms such as an improved SSSP algorithm, and a GPU scheduler for generational dependencies. I was also part of the High Fidelity Virtual Environments Lab, where I developed VR environments to test the effects of optical illusions in 3D space, and to test the accuracy of AR tracking through streaming services such as video conferencing.
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 (Accepted for publishing)
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
- Marcus Elvis Taylor Memorial Medal, April 2022
Teaching
Teaching Assistant, CSCI 111: Java 1, University of Mississippi, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024
Teaching Assistant, CSCI 211: Java 3, University of Mississippi, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024
Teaching Assistant, CSCI 444: Information Visualization in R, University of Mississippi, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
Teaching Assistant, CSCI 475: Introduction to Database Systems, University of Mississippi, Spring 2023, Spring 2024
Teaching Assistant, CSCI 356: Data Structures in Python, University of Mississippi, Spring 2023, Spring 2024
Guest Lecture, Heterogeneous Systems Research Lab Summer Research Program, Summer 2023
Lab Teaching Assistant, CSCI 111: Java 1, University of Mississippi, Spring 2022
Guest Lecture, ACM Intro to GitHub Workshop, University of Mississippi, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020