Computer Science

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Maanak Gupta has won Tennessee Tech’s prestigious Kinslow Engineering Research Award for his paper: “From ChatGPT to ThreatGPT: Impact of Generative AI in Cybersecurity and Privacy.”

The College of Engineering presents the award each year to a faculty member for the best paper published in a professional journal. Gupta’s paper, of which he is principal and first author, was published Aug. 1, 2023, in IEEE Access journal.

“I am humbled and excited for this recognition,” Gupta said. “The award is a testament of the impactful research we are doing in our Applied and Basic Cybersecurity (ABCyS) lab at the intersection of generative AI and cybersecurity. This award is also a recognition to my students, who are relentlessly working on cutting edge research.” 

Since its publication, Gupta’s paper has been cited 200 times and downloaded more than 50,000 times.

Allen MacKenzie, Ph.D., associate dean of research for the College of Engineering, said during the award ceremony: “In this work, Gupta and his team provide critical understanding of the cybersecurity consequences of the evolution of generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Google Bard. They present the vulnerabilities of AI and how it can be exploited by malicious users to exfiltrate information by bypassing the AI’s ethical rules. It is critical work amid a new era of AI-aided attacks, unleashing known and unknown transformations in cyberattacks to help us understand the risk and develop an effective defense, as well as provide a future direction for enhancing cybersecurity.”

Gupta, who has more than 95 published research articles to his credit, received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research interests include secure cyber physical systems, Internet of Things, cloud computing, malware analysis, and security solutions assisted by artificial intelligence and machine learning. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, Department of Defense and National Security Agency.

He has received two Tennessee Tech Wings Up 100 awards, which are presented to top faculty who bring in $100,000 or more in external funding for research, and he is invited regularly as a keynote speaker at conferences worldwide. He has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Cyber Security, was recognized as the 2016 RSA Security Scholar and received the 2019 Computer Science Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation research award from UT San Antonio.

The Kinslow Engineering Research Award commemorates Professor Emeritus Ray Kinslow, whose career at Tennessee Tech spanned 32 years. He led the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics for 25 of those years and was a prolific researcher, especially in hypervelocity impact.