The Grainger College of Engineering
Capital One Illinois Center for Generative AI Safety, Knowledge Systems, and Cybersecurity

People

Leadership

Kelly McKinley Kelly McKinley
Project Manager

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Heng Ji Heng Ji
ASKS Director

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science Professor

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Prem Natarajan Prem Natarajan
Chief Scientist and Head of Enterprise AI

Capital One

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Gang Wang Gang Wang
ASKS Associate Director

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science Associate Professor

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Advisory Board

Jiawei Han Jiawei Han
Michael Aiken Chair

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Bo Li Bo Li
Associate Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Milind Naphade Milind Naphade
Senior Vice President, AI Foundations

Capital One

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Ling Ren Ling Ren
Assistant Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Sambit Sahu Sambit Sahu
Vice President, AI Foundations

Capital One

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Gokhan Tur Gokhan Tur
Research Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Funded Projects

Heng Ji Heng Ji
Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project
Creative LLM Agents based on Thinking with Imagination

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Katherine Driggs-Campbell Katherine Driggs-Campbell
Associate Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Funded Project
When Magic Goes Wrong: Identifying and Understanding Failures of Agentic AI Systems in Multi-Turn and Sequential Tasks

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Reyhan Jabbarvand Reyhan Jabbarvand
Assistant Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project
TrACE-Contrast: Faithful & Consistent Code Reasoning via Trace-Aware Contrastive Learning

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Sasa Misailovic Sasa Misailovic
Associate Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project
SafeAgency: Safety Guaranteed Agentic AI

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Hao Peng Hao Peng
Assistant Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project
Advancing LLM Reasoning Faithfulness without Faithfulness Rewards

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Talia Ringer Talia Ringer
Assistant Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project
TrACE-Contrast: Faithful & Consistent Code Reasoning via Trace-Aware Contrastive Learning

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Gagandeep Singh Gagandeep Singh
Assistant Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project
Efficient Fairness Certification of Large Language Models

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Previously Funded Projects

Gang Wang Gang Wang
Associate Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Funded Project
LLM Reasoning for Code Safety: Evaluating and Enhancing Reasoning Faithfulness

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Bo Li Bo Li
Associate Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project
Sentinial Agent: Knowledge enabled secure agents for trustworthy agentic systems

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Heng Ji Heng Ji
Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project
LM-Dynamic: Teach Language Models to be super-speed readers

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Varun Chandrasekaran Varun Chandrasekaran
Assistant Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Funded Project
Toward more pragmatic llm jailbreaking

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Daniel Kang Daniel Kang
Assistant Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project
CVE-Bench++: A Difficult Benchmark for AI Agents and Cybersecurity

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Yuxiong Wang Yuxiong Wang
Associate Professor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project
Toward Safe and Trustworthy LLM Agents: Addressing Evaluation, Privacy, Multi-agent truthfulness

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Huan Zhang Huan Zhang
Assistant Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Funded Project
LLM Reasoning for Code Safety: Evaluating and Enhancing Reasoning Faithfulness

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Capital One Fellows

Yizhuo Chen Yizhuo Chen
PhD Student

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Hyeonjeong Ha Hyeonjeong Ha
PhD Student

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Jeonghwan Kim Jeonghwan Kim
PhD Student

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Cheng Qian Cheng Qian
PhD Student

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor

Chenyuan Yang Chenyuan Yang
PhD Student

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Funded Project

Ares of Research

Thesis Advisor