Mohsen Rakhshan
University of Central Florida, FL·Computer Science
Devices that read from or write to the brain and nervous system are moving quickly from labs into clinics and consumer products. They promise gains in medicine, education and communication, but brain data is unusually personal, and the same hardware and software can be misused.
- Fields
Computer Science
Neuroscience
Social Science
- Topics
neurotechnology
brain-computer interface
research security
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Map the research- and national-security risk landscape of neurotechnology across different recording and stimulation modalities and hardware/software platforms, identifying where vulnerabilities concentrate.
- Analyze case studies of known neurotechnology security breaches and dual-use incidents to ground the framework in documented failures rather than hypothetical ones.
- Build computational models for probabilistic threat assessment, estimating how likely particular misuse or attack scenarios are for a given neurotechnology application.
- Develop open-source training and assessment tools for institutions and developers, and propose secure-by-design standards for neurotechnology hardware, software and data pipelines.
More about the research
This project asks how to measure those risks and reduce them without shutting down the collaborations that make the technology advance in the first place.
Why it matters
Neurotechnology raises privacy, safety and security concerns that current practice does not systematically address. Publicly available risk frameworks, assessment tools and secure-by-design standards could help device developers, university research offices and policymakers weigh risk against the benefits of open collaboration, so that clinical and consumer brain interfaces can advance with fewer unintended consequences for the people whose neural data they handle.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ashley Feinsinger
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Neuroscience
Analyze the current state of participant engagement practices in implanted brain-computer interface research through qualitative interviews with four stakeholder groups, including participants, researchers and advocacy organizations.
Berk Gulmezoglu
Iowa State University, IA·Computer Science
Develop automated methods to discover and describe how little-studied low-level hardware behaviors in virtual and augmented reality devices can create side-channels that leak private user data.
Alvaro Cardenas
University of California-Santa Cruz, CA·Computer Science
Build a canonical, longitudinal dataset of high-impact research software that links repositories to dependencies, downstream users, contributors, affiliations, funding sources, scholarly use, and documented security events.
The school
University of Central Florida: 15 labs on PI Pages, $285M a year on research, 290 research doctorates a year.
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