About me
I am a Research Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University’s Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Coastal Virginia, working on Generative AI security, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure protection, and trustworthy embedded AI. Previously I was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Virginia Tech, specializing in secure, privacy-aware, and explainable AI for critical infrastructure.
My research spans hybrid AI — including LLMs, agentic AI, computer vision, and time-series forecasting — to secure AI-enabled systems, support anomaly detection, and enable robust decision-making in cyber-physical environments.
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Research interests
Security and trustworthiness of LLMs and agentic AI; cybersecurity; trustworthy and secure embedded AI for cyber-physical systems; anomaly detection and AI assurance.
Areas of expertise
- Critical infrastructure and control systems — SCADA and ICS security, water and wastewater treatment, OT monitoring, cyber-physical resilience
- Cybersecurity — intrusion detection and automated response, IoT and cross-layer threat detection, adversarial machine learning, threat-intelligence grounding (MITRE ATT&CK, CVE/NVD)
- Artificial intelligence — security and trustworthiness of LLMs and agentic systems, AI assurance and explainability, anomaly detection, time-series forecasting, generative modeling
- Digital media forensics — detection and source attribution of synthetic and adversarially manipulated imagery
- Telecommunications — LTE radio access network rollout, operations, and monitoring automation
Current work
I am Co-Investigator on a Commonwealth Cyber Initiative program developing agentic AI for scalable, cost-effective protection of critical infrastructure. Recent work includes H-CLAIR, a two-tier cross-layer intrusion detection and response framework that pairs an always-on lightweight model ensemble with an LLM verifier grounded in MITRE ATT&CK and CVE/NVD, plus a constrained-MDP response agent — evaluated on ToN_IoT, SWaT, and WADI.
Appointments
- Research Assistant Professor, Old Dominion University — December 2025 to present
- Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Virginia Tech — January 2025 to December 2025
- Graduate Research Assistant, Virginia Tech — August 2019 to December 2024
Education
- Ph.D., Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, 2024 — dissertation on AI methods for anomaly detection in cyber-physical systems, chaired by Feras A. Batarseh
- M.S., Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, 2022
- B.S., Electrical and Electronic Engineering, BUET, Dhaka, 2015
News
December 2025 — Old Dominion University becomes first university to earn NSA Cybersecurity Validation 
February 2025 — Joining as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Virginia Tech, affiliated with CCI and BSE/ECE. 
November 2024 — Successfully defended Ph.D. dissertation from Virginia Tech 
November 2024 — Attended AAAI Fall-24 Symposium
October 2024 — 11 recent cyber attacks on the water and wastewater sector 
May 2024 — New partnership uses AI to bolster efficiency, cybersecurity for water treatment 
September 2022 — A3 Lab and Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) partner with DC Water for Tunnel Water Level Forecasting
June 2022 — Presented MAA paper in 2022 SDSS Conference 
Talks and presentations
SDSS 2022 — Model-Agnostic Scoring Methods for Artificial Intelligence Assurance, Symposium on Data Science and Statistics, June 2022. Model-agnostic pipelines for scoring explainability, safety, and security of AI systems. Abstract
Open-source
- Context-Driven Forecasting — dataset and reproducible code for the context-driven forecasting study
- AgriVision — dataset and benchmark framework for synthetic/adversarial image detection in agriculture
Elsewhere
Google Scholar · LinkedIn · GitHub · msikder@odu.edu
Publications appear under M. N. K. Sikder; pre-2016 work under N. K. Sikder.