🧾 CV

📧 Email: danijy@tamu.edu
📍 Location: College Station, TX
🔗 LinkedIn · Google Scholar · GitHub · Website

🎓 Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Texas A&M University (Jan 2022 – Present)
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Cincinnati (Aug 2019 – 2022, transferred)
M.S. in Computer Science, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi (2017 – 2019)
B.Tech in Information Technology, Charusat University, India (2013 – 2017)

🧠 Research Interests

Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning · AI & Cryptography · Traffic Analysis ·
Side-Channel Attacks · Trust in Language Models · Adversarial ML · Web Tracking · Deep Learning

🔬 Research Experience

Graduate Research Assistant — Texas A&M University (2022 – Present)

Leading research at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity, focusing on privacy, cryptography, adversarial robustness, and LLM trustworthiness.
Designed a deep learning framework to assess cryptographic indistinguishability with explainable AI and LLMs.
Developed a deep learning attack that exposed flaws in honeyword-based authentication, identifying real passwords with up to 53% first-attempt and 99% ten-attempt success rates — surpassing random guessing (5–50%).
Designed and developed a robust MPC protocol for secure, verifiable ML inference in adversarial settings.
Co-developed FPTrace to expose the use of browser fingerprinting for ad tracking, even under GDPR/CCPA compliance.
Co-investigated ethical risks in on-device SLMs, uncovering failures in filtering, fairness, and user privacy.

Graduate Research Assistant — Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi (2017 – 2019)

Led a high-throughput phenotyping project using UAVs to capture multispectral crop imagery.
Applied computer vision algorithms for plant stress detection, enabling early-stage yield prediction.
Trained supervised ML models to analyze plant growth patterns and health indicators from 3D data.
Integrated UAV imaging workflows into agricultural pipelines, improving operational efficiency by 30%.
Worked in a cross-disciplinary team bridging computer science, agronomy, and geospatial analytics.

💼 Industry Experience

Software Engineering Intern — Apollo Tyres Ltd., India (2017)

Developed a tyre rating and mold management system that reduced manual processing time by 35%.
Built interactive web dashboards to visualize defect trends and operational performance.
Improved system reliability by 25% through backend optimizations and error tracking tools.
Collaborated across QA, production, and IT teams to gather user feedback and iterate on design.
Increased tyre evaluation accuracy by 20% by integrating automated scoring algorithms.

Embedded Systems Intern — Hewlett-Packard, India (2015)

Developed a gesture-controlled vehicle using tilt sensors and embedded microcontroller systems.
Engineered real-time gesture recognition algorithms, improving latency by 30%.
Led sensor fusion and calibration efforts to enhance control precision and signal reliability.

📄 Publications

Master’s Thesis

Jimmy Dani, Jinha Jung, Mohammed Belkhouche, Kranthi Mandadi, Scott King, Detecting Plant Phenotypes From 3D Point Cloud Data.

Peer-reviewed

[PST 2025] Jimmy Dani, Kalyan Nakka, and Nitesh Saxena, A Machine Learning-Based Framework for Assessing Cryptographic Indistinguishability of Lightweight Block Ciphers, arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.19683 (2024).
[WWW 2025] Zengrui Liu, Jimmy Dani, Nitesh Saxena Yunzhi Cao, The First Early Evidence of the Use of Browser Fingerprinting for Online Tracking, In Proceedings of 2025 ACM Web Conference (WWW).
[HOST 2023] Chenggang Wang, Jimmy Dani, Shane Reilly, Austen Brownfield, Boyang Wang, John M. Emmert, TripletPower: Deep-Learning Side-Channel Attacks over Few Traces, In Proceedings of 2023 IEEE Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST).
[IWQoS 2022] Hao Lui, Jimmy Dani, Hongkai Yu, Wenhai Sun, and Boyang Wang, AdvTraffic: Obfuscating Encrypted Traffic with Adversarial Examples, In Proceedings of 2022 IEEE/ACM Quality of Service (IWQoS).
[IRI 2021] Jimmy Dani and Boyang Wang, HiddenText: Cross-Trace Website Fingerprinting over Encrypted Traffic. In Proceedings of 2022 Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI).
[CODASPY 2021] Chenggang Wang, Jimmy Dani, Xiang Li, Xiaodong Jia, and Boyang Wang. Adaptive Fingerprinting: Website Fingerprinting over Few Encrypted Traffic, In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY).

Pre-prints

[ArXiv] Kalyan Nakka, Jimmy Dani, Nitesh Saxena, LiteLMGuard: Seamless and Lightweight On-Device Prompt Filtering for Safeguarding Small Language Models against Quantization-induced Risks and Vulnerabilities.
[ArXiv] Jason Wang, Jimmy Dani, Juan Garay, Soamar Homsi, and Nitesh Saxena, Robust and Verifiable MPC with Applications to Linear Machine Learning Inference.
[ArXiv] Kalyan Nakka, Jimmy Dani, Nitesh Saxena, Is On-Device AI Broken and Exploitable? Assessing the Trust and Ethics in Small Language Models, arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.05364 (2024).
[ArXiv] Jimmy Dani, Brandon McCulloh, and Nitesh Saxena, When AI Defeats Password Deception! A Deep Learning Framework to Distinguish Passwords and Honeywords, arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.16964 (2024).

🎓 Student Mentoring

MS Students: Aayush Yadav, Anuska Pant, Veronika Maragulova
UG Students: Mac Morrison, Mihir Cherukupalli, Aleksa Mićanović, Adnaan Yunus

🧑‍⚖️ Academic Service

Reviewer: ACM TOPS (2024)
Sub-reviewer: ACM CCS (2023, 2024, 2025), WWW (2024), ACSAC (2023)

🏆 Honors & Awards

Awarded Best Performer in the Computer Organization & Microprocessor laboratory at Charusat University.
Recipient of the Merit Scholarship in the Department of Information Technology at Charusat University.
Ranked first in the Co-Digest (Coding) event on Charusat University’s 16th Annual Day.
Recipient of UGS award at the University of Cincinnati.

📜 Certifications

Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA C/C++ from NVIDIA.
Applications of AI for Anomaly Detection from NVIDIA.
Big Data & Machine Learning by Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
Advanced Professional Development Certificate in Career Exploration from Texas A&M University Graduate and Professional School.

📥 You can request a full PDF version of my CV via email or view/download it here.

Jimmy Dani