Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar

Research Interests

• Human-Centered and Usable Security
• Exploration of Nuanced Factors in Generative AI Systems
• Development of Context-Aware Intelligent Systems
• Design of Resilient and Interpretable Evaluation Metrics
• Performance Evaluation and Analysis of Generative AI Models

Memberships/Affiliations

• IEEE Member
• Member of Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS)
• Member of Women in Data Science (WiDS)
• Member of the Transportation Research Board

Service

• Campus Ambassador (2022), Women in Data Science (WiDS) at The University of Texas at Dallas
• Co-Keynote Speaker, 11th ACM International Workshop on Security and Privacy Analytics (IWSPA 2025)
• Reviewer and Sub-Reviewer for: IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (ACM TPS), IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData), International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA), ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT)

List of Journal Publications

• Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Md Nahiyan Uddin, Trayce Hockstad, Latifur Khan, Mizanur Rahman, Mashrur Chowdhury, M Sabbir Salek, Bhavani Thuraisingham, Steven Jones (2024). Retrieval Augmented Generation-Based Large Language Models for Bridging Transportation Cybersecurity Legal Knowledge Gaps, Transportation Research Record (TRR) 2025.
• Trayce Hockstad, Mizanur Rahman, Mashrur Chowdhury, Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Md Nahiyan Uddin, Latifur Khan (2024). Data Security & Privacy Regulation in the U.S.: A 50-State Legislative Survey, Transportation Research Record (TRR) 2025.
• Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Yigong Wang, Gbadebo Ayoade, Yang Gao, Anoop Singhal, Latifur Khan, Bhavani Thuraisingham, Kangkook Jee (2023). Advanced Persistent Threat Detection Using Data Provenance and Metric Learning. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC), 20(5), pp. 3957–3969.
• Nusrat Jahan Mozumder, Maitraye Das, Tanzima Hashem, Sharmin Afrose, Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar (2019). Towards Privacy-preserving Authenticated Disease Risk Queries. Journal of Information Processing (JIP), 27, pp. 624–642.

List of Conference Publications and Presentations

• Bhavani Thuraisingham, Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar (2025). Trustworthy and Secure Artificial Intelligence for Transportation Systems Security and Resiliency. ACM Workshop on Secure and Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems (SaT-CPS 2025), pp. 1–2.
• Arnav Nishith Sharma, Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Bhavani Thuraisingham, Latifur Khan (2025). Enhancing Security Insights with KnowGen-RAG: Combining Knowledge Graphs, LLMs, and Multimodal Interpretability. Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Workshop on Security and Privacy Analytics (IWSPA '25), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pp. 2–12.
• Jinghui Guo, Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Latifur Khan, Bhavani Thuraisingham, Saquib Irtiza (2025). Streamlining Research Complexities for Artificial Intelligence Agents: Charting Pathways to Innovative Idea Generation. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Computer, Data Sciences and Applications (ACDSA 2025).
• Saquib Irtiza, Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Arowa Yasmeen, Latifur Khan, Ovidiu Daescu, Bhavani Thuraisingham (2024). LLM-Sentry: A Model-Agnostic Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Securing Large Language Models. 2024 IEEE 6th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications (TPS-ISA), IEEE, pp. 245–254.
• Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Fariha Ishrat Rahman, Anoop Singhal, Latifur Khan, Bhavani Thuraisingham (2023). The Design and Application of a Unified Ontology for Cyber Security. 19th International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS 2023), Springer Nature, Cham, pp. 23–41.
• Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Sadaf Md Halim, Anoop Singhal, Basel Abdeen, Latifur Khan, Bhavani Thuraisingham (2023). The Design of an Ontology for ATT&CK and its Application to Cybersecurity. 13th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY 2023), pp. 295–297.
• Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Sadaf Md Halim, Yibo Hu, Anoop Singhal, Latifur Khan, Bhavani Thuraisingham (2022). Knowledge Mining in Cybersecurity: From Attack to Defense. 36th Data and Applications Security and Privacy Conference (DBSec 2022), Springer, Cham, pp. 110–122.
• Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Yigong Wang, Md Shihabul Islam, Anoop Singhal, Latifur Khan, Bhavani Thuraisingham (2021). Identifying Tactics of Advanced Persistent Threats with Limited Attack Traces. 17th International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS 2021), Springer, Cham, pp. 3–25.
• Gbadebo Ayoade, Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Pracheta Sahoo, Yang Gao, Anmol Agarwal, Kangkook Jee, Latifur Khan, Anoop Singhal (2020). Evolving Advanced Persistent Threat Detection using Provenance Graph and Metric Learning. IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS 2020), pp. 1–9.
• Maitraye Das, Nusrat Jahan Mozumder, Sharmin Afrose, Khandakar Ashrafi Akbar, Tanzima Hashem (2018). A Novel Secret Sharing Approach for Privacy-Preserving Authenticated Disease Risk Queries in Genomic Databases. 42nd IEEE Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2018), pp. 645–654. (Recipient of the Best Paper Award at IEEE COMPSAC 2018)