Towards Compositional Secure Autonomy: From Perception to Control

Abstract:  

Autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars, drones, and mobile robots, are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in our society. These systems are composed of multiple individual software components for perception, prediction, planning, and control. While these systems are now blurring the lines between traditional computing systems and human intelligence and revolutionizing markets, a significant gap exists in developing theory and practice that indicates how the behavior of each component can be unified to reason about their system-wide security. This gap is exacerbated by the increasing use of learning-enabled components with inputs from diverse sensors and actuators that operate in open and uncontrolled physical environments.

Bio:

Z. Berkay Celik is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, where he is the co-director of the Purdue Security (PurSec) laboratory and a member of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). His research investigates the design and evaluation of security for software and systems, specifically on emerging computing platforms that integrate machine learning algorithms and the complex physical environments in which they operate. Through systems design, program analysis, and formal methods, his research seeks to improve security and privacy guarantees in commodity computer systems. His research approach is best illustrated by his extensive work on the Internet of Things (IoT)/Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), including robotic vehicles, automobiles, self-driving cars, industrial control systems, and mobile systems, such as smartphones, wearables (e.g., smart watches, AR/VR headsets). He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2022, Google’s ASPIRE Research Award three times between 2021 and 2023, the Amazon Research Award in 2024, and the Google Academic Research Award in 2025. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Transportation (USDOT), Department of Energy (DOE), Denso North America Foundation, Google, Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Rolls-Royce, and Sandia National Laboratories. More information about his research group and publication record is available at https://beerkay.github.io.