Teodora Baluta

[CV][Research Statement][Teaching Statement]

I am actively recruiting graduate students to work with, please reach out if you are interested!

I’m an Assistant Professor at the School of Cybersecurity & Privacy at Georgia Tech. I did my PhD in CS at the National University of Singapore (NUS), advised by Prateek Saxena and Kuldeep S. Meel.

I work in computer security. My research is on rigorous security analyses for machine learning (ML) systems, consisting of the following foundational aspects:

• Definitions: Stochastic gradient descent steps are collision resistant, under precise definitions and mild testable conditions [CCS 23]. This is useful in solving intellectual property disputes.

• Abstractions: We propose a causal model for stochastic gradient descent to analyze the connection between generalization and tests for memorization [CCS 22a].

• Sound procedures for statistical verifiability: black-box [ICSE 21] and white-box [CCS 19].

Broader Interests. I enjoy problems that are both algorithmic and practically relevant. I have also worked on differential privacy for graphs [CCS 21][CCS 22b], learnability of security analysis rules [NDSS 19], improving SAT solving using causality [SAT 23], and cross-language code translation [FSE 21][OOPSLA 23].

My research has been recognized and supported by the Google PhD Fellowship (2021-2023), EECS Rising Stars 2023, Dean’s Graduate Research Excellence Award (2022-2023, Sem.2), and the President’s Graduate Fellowship (2017-2021). I was selected as a finalist for the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, Asia-Pacific (2021).

I was a Teaching Assistant @ NUS for several courses: Systems Security CS5231 Fall 2019, Systems Security CS5231 Fall 2018, and Intro to Security CS3235.

Invited Talks: CISPA, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, UC Santa Barbara, Northeastern, Purdue, Georgia Tech, University of Waterloo, UC Santa Cruz, Columbia, University of Southern California, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Sydney, Arizona State University, University of British Columbia.