Hi! I’m Dr. Luis Antonio Garcia. I am an Assistant Professor at The University of Utah Kahlert School of Computing focusing on the security and safety of learning-enabled Cyber-physical Systems (CPS)/Internet-of-Things (IoT). I was previously a Research Assistant Professor at the USC Department of Computer Science and a Research Lead at the  USC Information Sciences Institute. I previously held a postdoctoral appointment at the Networked & Embedded Systems Laboratory at the UCLA ECE Department, collaborating with Dr. Mani Srivastava. I have my PhD in Computer Engineering with a Cybersecurity focus from Rutgers University, where my research advisor was Dr. Saman Zonouz–who is now at Georgia Tech. My dissertation was titled “Physics for the Sake of Security, Security for the Sake of Physics”. Please don’t confuse me with the other Dr. Luis Garcia from Rutgers that roamed the academic world of the 80’s.

I was previously an academic intern at the Logical Systems Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, where I collaborated with Dr. André Platzer in 2017. We worked on the verification of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in the context of cyber-physical systems. I also interned as a Software Developer Intern at Siemens Corporate Research in 2015 working with Dr. Dong Wei on PLC security.

Research Interests

I develop methods to ensure trustworthy and resilient autonomous systems that interact with humans both in and on control loops. Driven by real-world stakeholders, my goal is to enable a relationship for providing mutual assurances between deep-learning-enabled cyber-physical systems and humans in safety-critical contexts. In particular, my research aims to answer the following three questions: In particular, my research aims to answer the following three questions:

• Leveraging semantics to retrofit security and resiliency.. For deployed and legacy systems, how can we leverage knowledge about a cyber-physical system’s semantics, e.g., the underlying physical equations, to enhance safety and security at all levels of the software stack?
• Integrating Human Logic & Deep Learning for Trustworthy Autonomous Design. What are the correct ways to interface symbolic knowledge and deep learning models in cyber-physical systems that allow humans to understand and intervene decision-making processes?
• Secure, Private, and Useful Ubiquitous Sensing. With the explosion of IoT sensors, how can we expose useful programming abstractions to developers while ensuring secure and private cyber-physical information flow?

Feel free to take a deep dive into a breakdown of my publications and research interests here.

If you are a Ph.D. student, potential postdoc, or if you would like to potentially work with me under a directed research, please send me an email. I’m always open to collaboration.