Before joining UC Santa Cruz, Alvaro A. Cardenas was the Eugene McDermott Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, and a research staff member at Fujitsu Laboratories. He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a B.S. from Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. His research interests focus on security and privacy of cyber-physical systems, including autonomous vehicles, drones, and embodied AI.
Relevant expertise:
- Secure AI for autonomous aircraft: Developing robust AI models resilient to adversarial attacks for autonomous drone operations, including automatic recovery mechanisms for compromised autonomous systems
- Developing benchmarks and environments to test embodied AI drones and their reaction to edge cases and sudden maneuvers that require common-sense reasoning