Sam Suri is a privacy and security researcher, focused on protecting the privacy of our everyday movements and actions, the security of our devices, and the safeguards that underpin the AI tools that have become ubiquitous in our lives. He cares about the vulnerable groups that can be impacted the most by these risks.
Sam has worked at a number of technology companies, helping them to proactively design security and privacy mechanisms and reactively mitigate known vulnerabilities. If you use a smartphone, you are probably interacting with mitigations that Sam has designed.
Security doesn't stop at memory corruption, it takes many forms and it impacts people where they are, from victims of intimate partner violence facing threat actors that are close to their personal lives, to a child’s bedroom and the AI-enabled speaker that reads them a bedtime story, to the engineer trusting the AI agent that has full control of their computer and the sensitive data on it.
Working with Professor James Mickens, Sam will be researching how to effectively sandbox malicious AI models, even those that might eventually become capable of actual thought and decide they don’t want to be constrained by their creators. This includes more comprehensive OS security and sandboxing mechanisms and new safeguards that constrain the theoretical capabilities of the model and allow for greater interpretability and alignment.
Beyond this, Sam is interested in interactive art and poetry and constantly wonders how artistic mediums can be used to convey dimensions like emotions and shared experiences. Artistic mediums can augment advocacy and allow deeply technical issues to become more approachable and relatable.