Jaron Mink

“It was a fluke!” Jaron Mink jokes.

The early career cybersecurity researcher recounts how he spent the first days of his undergraduate program at the University of California, Los Angeles, in uncertainty. Thanks to inspirational high school teachers, he gravitated toward STEM studies but was unsure of his focus. To satisfy a degree requirement, Mink enrolled in a computer science class.

“I immediately fell in love with the logic behind programming and the rest is history,” he says.

Mink joins the School of Computing and Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, as an assistant professor in computer science and engineering. He will begin by introducing a class in trustworthy computer interaction in artificial intelligence, or AI, and will later teach broader computer security and privacy courses.

After being awarded his doctoral degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Mink served as a visiting scholar and research fellow at the Max Planck Institute. He is a past recipient of a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation for his work examining security analysts’ trust in the classification decisions of machine learning models. He has given conference talks at symposiums for USENIX, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Mink is an emerging leader in the study of how human interaction impacts the security of machine learning, a critical component of AI. His work explores how applications of AI can create security vulnerabilities and how that same technology could be used to mitigate risks. He is already exploring potential collaborations through pwn.college — the online global hub for cybersecurity education developed by Fulton Schools faculty members.

He has also been hard at work on community service projects. He helped develop the SAIL: Cybersecurity Ninja Training Course designed to teach high school students to protect themselves online.

Mink says he is excited to call ASU his new home.

“I felt an immediate sense of kinship with the culture of both the faculty and students at ASU,” he says. “The security community at ASU is one of the strongest forces in the field, driving groundbreaking research that propels the entire discipline.”

In his free time, Mink enjoys swing dancing, playing board games, hiking with friends and weight training. One day, he hopes to learn to play jazz piano.

Meet the newest faculty members of the Fulton Schools of Engineering here.

Written by Kelly deVos