Younes Karimi

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT YOUNES KARIMI

I received my Ph.D. in Informatics from Penn State University, where I conducted research at the intersection of social network mining, cybersecurity, privacy, and natural language processing. I primarily focused on the X (Twitter) activities of ISIS, as an extremist and terrorist group, and the Islamic regime in Iran, as an authoritarian regime. I investigated their techniques and strategies for disseminating propagandistic messages on social networks, manipulating online communities, influencing people, recruiting new members, and gaining global support. I collected tens of millions of tweets, fine-tuned large language models, and built various classifiers for automated identification of content and users supporting ISIS or the Iranian government. I further modeled and clustered the longitudinal behavior of users and analyzed their connections, support networks, and potential influence.Besides, I worked on two corpora containing millions of privacy policies and question-answer pairs extracted from them and prepared them for public release. I performed large-scale analysis on these datasets to identify common patterns and practices and unique characteristics of the policy documents. I also studied online social networks\' privacy and used machine learning–based approaches for the timely detection of doxing and malicious disclosures of sensitive private information on X. During the last few months of my Ph.D, I worked as the Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at a video stream translation startup, LingoPal. In this role, I employed, developed, enhanced, and deployed various state-of-the-art machine learning, natural language and audio processing and generation models, tools, and techniques.I received my M.Sc. in Computer Science from SUNY at Albany, where I worked on a DARPA project to detect and defend NASA JPL employees against phishing, spear phishing, and social engineering attacks. I also researched online user reviews of Google Play Store Android applications and customer reviews of Amazon products to automatically identify their privacy and security aspects and corresponding user opinions, concerns and complaints.I have published multiple papers on these topics in prestigious conferences/journals and served as a reviewer for various conferences. Additionally, as a graduate teaching assistant at Penn State and my former schools, I have helped in numerous courses such as information security, malware analytics, network security, systems programming, and cybersecurity analytics and operations.