K.P. (Suba) Subbalakshmi is a Professor in the Department of ECE at Stevens Institute of Technology, where she directs the Infinity Lab.
She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a Jefferson Science Fellow, and a Member of the National Academy of Science Engineering and Medicines' Intelligence Science and Technology Experts Group. She is also the recipient of the AFOSR summer faculty fellowship, 2024 and 2025. She serves as a mentor to the NYU Stern Endless Frontier Labs Program.
Her current research areas are in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with an emphasis on trustworthiness (model interpretability, trustworthy decisions, trustworthy data/information). She also works on applications to mental health, cyber safety/security and cognitive radio networking. Specific areas are: Mental Health: early stage cognitive impairment detection (including Alzheimers’ disease), depression and other mental health conditions; Cyber security/safety — explainable AI for claim verification, rumor dynamics on social media, deception detection from text content, image/video steganography and steganalysis, information confusion in social media; Cognitive radio networks and security – algorithms and design; attacks, countermeasures and systems level impact; Cognitive mobile cloud computing – spectrum and radio resource aware optimal mobile computing.
She was named a Jefferson Science Fellow in 2016. As a JSF, she served as a senior science and technology adviser to the US Department of State. In that role, she worked at the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, the Deputate of International Communications and Information Policy, Office of Multilateral Affairs (EB/CIP/MA), where she worked on technology policy issues in Information Communication Technologies like IoT and 5G communications as well as Artificial Intelligence and ML.
She served as the Founding Director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence from 2018 to 2020 , where she is now an affiliated faculty. She has Co-founded several technology start-up companies. She has served/is serving as associate editor for several journals including IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence and the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. She was a Founding Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking.
She is the Founding Chair of the Special Interest Group on Security, IEEE COMSOC's Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks. She was the Technical Program Committee Chair of IEEE DySPAN 2019 and the Poster Co-Chair IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security, 2019.
She is a recipient of the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame, Innovator Award. Her research is supported by NSF, NIJ, AFRL, US ISSO, CCDC and other DoD agencies as well as Industry.
Suba received a PhD in Engineering Science from the Simon Fraser University, Canada; M.E in Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and B.Sc in Physics from the University of Madras.
Most of her current publications can be found: here, here, or here.
She is affiliated with the Stevens Center for the Advancement of Secure Systems and Information Assurance (CASSIA).
Complete list of pubications can be found here
AFOSR Summer Faculty Fellow, 2024, 2025
Fellow, National Academy of Inventors, 2018
Jefferson Science Fellow, 2016
New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame, Innovator Award, October 2012
Our Paper: "Standardization and research in cognitive and dynamic spectrum access networks: IEEE SCC41 efforts and other activities", Fabrizio Granelli, P.Pawelczak, R.V. Prasad, K.P. Subbalakshmi, R. Chandramouli, J.A. Hoffmeyer, H.S. Berger, IEEE Communications Magazine, Pages: 71 - 79, June 2010,appears on the Wireless Spectrum Research and Development (WSRD), Senior Steering Group (SSG) Suggested Readings, 2011.
Our Paper: "Standardization and research in cognitive and dynamic spectrum access networks: IEEE SCC41 efforts and other activities", Fabrizio Granelli, P.Pawelczak, R.V. Prasad, K.P. Subbalakshmi, R. Chandramouli, J.A. Hoffmeyer, H.S. Berger, IEEE Communications Magazine, Pages: 71 - 79, June 2010, appears in the IEEE COMSOC Best Reading Topics on Cognitive Radio, 2012 ().
Technogenesis Award for Research and Technology Contributions, 2007.
IEEE Best Student Paper Award, for the paper, "Real-Time Secondary Spectrum Sharing with QoS Provisioning", Yiping Xing, Chetan Nanjunda Mathur, Mohamed Haleem, R. Chandramouli and K.P. Subbalakshmi, IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference 2005, Special Session on Agile Radios and Cooperative Networking for Next Generation Wireless Networks.
Stevens President's Research Recognition Award, 2003.
Reviewer ICLR 2026
Member, IEEE COMSOC TCCN Awards Committee, 2025
Mentor, NYU Stern Endless Frontier Labs, 2024 -- present
Lead Guest Editor, Special Issue on New Developments in Explainable and Interpretable AI, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 2021 - 2022
Steering Committee, ACM, WiseML, April 2020 --
Member, IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks (TCCN) Recognition Award Committee 2020
Member, National Academy of Science Engineering and Medicines' Intelligence Science and Technology Experts Group, Fall 2019
Founding Director, Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence, March 2018 --
Senior Science and Technology Advisor to the US Department of State as a Jefferson Science Fellow, Fall 2016
Member, Board of Studies, Amrita University, Fall 2017 -- Fall 2018
IEEE International Conference on Communications 2021, Proposal Committee, January 2016
Mentor to N2Women, Young Researcher Fellowship Award Winner for organizing an N2Women meeting at IEEE GLOBECOM 2016.
Co-Chair, IEEE GLOBECOM 2017, Symposium on Cognitive Radio Networking, 2017.
Organizer and Track Chair, IEEE GLOBECOM 2016, Symposium on Selected Areas of Communication, Social Networking, 2016
Stevens Provost Search Committee, Spring 2016
Member, Executive Board, NSF SAVI: Institute for Cognitive Networking (iCON), September 2015 -- 2018
Subject Matter Expert, National Spectrum Consortium, July 2015 -- July 2016
Founding Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking, (January 2015 --)
Stevens NSF ADVANCE Advisory Board, Dec 2014 -
Stevens Board of Trustees Committee on Research and Technology Commercialization, Fall 2014- Fall 2016
Founding Chair, Security Special Interest Group, IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks (COMSOC), June 2013 --
Stevens Senate, Fall 2012 -- 2014
Vice-Chair, North America Region, IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks (COMSOC), 2011 -- 2013
Tutorial, ``Deep Learning in Wireless Security and Privacy for Next-Generation Communication Systems", IEEE GLOBECOM December 2021.
Panelist, Panel on Advanced Techniques for Radio Resource Management at the NSF Workshop on Science and Engineering of Spectrum: Current Challenges and Future Directions, in support of the NSF SII program, May 20, 2020.
Key Note Address, ``AI/ML and Wireless Security", ACM Workshop on Wireless Security and Machine Learning (WiseML 2019)
Panelist, NJ Tech Council Future Forum, "AI: The Challenges Ahead,," NJ Tech Council, Bell Works, Holmdel, NJ, Holmdel, NJ, United States, May 7, 2019.
Invited Talk, SWIFT Institute Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Financial Industry, "Limitations in Deploying Artificial Intelligence," SWIFT Institute, New York City, NYC, New York, May 2, 2019.
Invited Talk, Artificial Intelligence and its Impact on Education and Economy, NJ Vocational School Summer Summit, July 2018
Panelist, Panel on Future of Life Science Careers at the 2018 Life Sciences Talent Network Annual Industry Summit, 2018
Invited Talk, "Artificial Intelligence and Mental health care", Public Health Seminar Series, University of California, Irvine, April 23, 2018
Distinguished Lecture, Jefferson Science Fellows Distinguished Lecture Series,``Artificial Intelligence: Practice and Policy", Washington DC, August 2017
Panel Moderator, "Current Research Trends in the US", First International Workshop and Summer School on 5G and Cognitive Networking: Affordably connecting the next billion, July 2016
Lecture, "Spectrum Aware Mobile Computing", First International Workshop and Summer School on 5G and Cognitive Networking: Affordably connecting the next billion, South Africa, July 2016
Panelist for the panel on "Software Defined RF: A Spectrum of Opportunities", 2016 C4I & Cyber Conference, Utica, NY, June 15, 2016
Invited Talk, "Software Defined HetNets: Design Challenges and Security Issues", 2016 C4I & Cyber Conference, Utica, NY, June 14, 2016
Plenary Talk, " Challenges in Social Media Security and Forensics", at the International Workshop on Cyber Threat Resilience, Thiruvananthapuram, India, October 2015
Plenary Talk, “Challenges in Social Media Security”, Trusted Systems Workshop, KTU, India, October 2015.
Invited Presentation, Hoboken: Model City for Advanced Spectrum Sharing, NTIA & FCC Model City Workshop, April 16th, 2015, Washington DC.
Mini-Course, Dynamic Spectrum Access Wireless Networking: Security, Systems and Standards", at NSF WiFiUS Summer School, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, August 14--16, 2013.
Tutorial (invited) on "Securing Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks", at the IEEE IMSA (International Conference on Internet Multimedia Systems: Architectures and Applications), Dec 2011.
Tutorial (invited) on "Securing Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks", at the IEEE WINGCOM (Next Generation Wireless Communications Technologies), Dec 2011.
Panel speaker (invited), IEEE Workshop on Dynamic Spectrum Access: Collaboration between the technical, regulatory and business communities, Sep 19th, 2011, Washington DC.
Keynote Address (invited), Securing Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) Networks, SMi International Software Defined Radio, June 2011, London, UK.
Tutorial on Security Issues in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks, IEEE International Conference on Communications, May 27, 2010, South Africa.
Tutorial on Cognitive Radio Network Security, IEEE Sarnoff Symposium 2009, Princeton, NJ.
Panelist (invited), Security Issues in Cognitive Radio Networks, Panel on Cognitive Radio Wireless Networking: An Emerging Frontier, at IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2008, Beijing China.
Member, Best Paper Awards Selection Committee, IEEE TCCN (2019, 2020)
Founding Chair, Special Interest Group on Security, IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks, June 2013 --
Vice-Chair, North America Region, IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks, (January 2011 -- January 2013)
Secretary, IEEE COMSOC Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, (June 2006 -June 2008)
Chair, Special Interest Group on Security, IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, (2005 -2010)
Member, IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks, (2007, --)
Member, IEEE Technical Committee on Communications Security, (2005 -)
Member, Best Paper Awards Selection Committee, IEEE MMC (2004 -).
Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, January 1, 2021 -- 2024
Lead Guest Editor, Special Issue on New Developments in Explainable and Interpretable AI, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 2021 - 2022
Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, January 1, 2020 --
Founding Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking, January 2015 – January 2020
Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, August 2013 – August 2016.
Guest Editor, EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, Special Issue Security Challenges and Issues in Cognitive Radio Networks, 2013.
Founding Associate Editor, Journal of Cyber Security and Mobility, 2011-present.
Guest Editor, EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, Special Issue on Dynamic Spectrum Access for Wireless Networking, along with John Chapin, Ananthram Swami and R. Chandramouli, 2008-2009.
Associate Editor, IS&T/SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging, May 2007 – 2014.
Associate Editor, Advances in Multimedia, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, July 2006—2008.
Guest Editor, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Special Issue on Cross-Layer Optimized Wireless Multimedia Communications, 2006.
Technical Program Committee Co-Chair, IEEE DySPAN 2019
Poster Chair, IEEE Conference on Communication and Network Security (CNS) 2019
Member, IEEE ICC 2021, Proposal Committee for New York City
Symposium Co-Chair, Symposium on Cognitive Radio Networking, IEEE GLOBECOM 2017.
IEEE GLOBECOM 2016, Symposium on Selected Areas of Communication, Social Networks Track, Washington DC, 2016
IEEE International Conference on Communications, Symposium on Selected Areas of Communication, Dresden, Germany,2009
Founding Co-Chair, IEEE WoWMoM, Workshop on Security, Privacy and Authentication in Wireless Networks, 2008
IEEE 17th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, Network Security Symposium, 2008
IEEE 16th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, Network Security Symposium, 2007
IEEE GLOBECOM, Symposium on Network and Information Systems Security, 2006.
Special Tracks Co-Chair
IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, 2006, 2007.
STC CrownCom 2007.
Technical Track Chair, Multimedia Technology Track, IEEE International Conf. on Information Technology: Research and Education, 2003.
Special Sessions Organizer/Session Chair
Joint Source-Channel Coding, Picture Coding Symposium 2003 , (jointly with Pierre Siohan, IRISA-INRIA, France)
Technical Demonstration/Exhibition, IEEE International Conference on Information Technology: Research and Education, 2003
Current Trends in Multimedia Communications and Computing, IEEE ITCC 2001
Best Student Paper Award Selection Committee, ITCC 2001, 2002.
Session Chair, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 2004.
Session Chair, IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2006.
Network Security, IEEE 16th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, Hawaii, August 2007.
Spectrum Sensing, CrownCom 2007, Orlando Florida, August 2007.
Joint Source-Channel Coding, Picture Coding Symposium 2003.
Current Trends in Multimedia Communications and Computing, IEEE ITCC 2001
First ACM Workshop on Cognitive Radio Architectures for Broadband, Oct 4, 2013.
First IEEE International Workshop on Cognitive Radio and Networks, in conjunction with PIMRC, 2008.
First International Workshop on Information Security, 2006.
IEEE Wireless Communication and Networking Conference, 2007.
Digital Forensics Research Workshop (DFRWS), August 2006.
Network Security Symposium, IEEE GLOBECOM, 2006.
IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2006.
IWCMC 2006, Sensor and Wireless Resource Management.
IEEE MILCOM, 2005.
First IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, Irvine California, Dec 2005
2005 Digital Forensics Research Workshop (DFRWS), New Orleans, August 2005.
IEEE International Workshop on Adaptive Wireless Networks (AWiN), GLOBECOM 2005.
IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, 2004.
IEEE International Conference on Communications, Multimedia Symposium, 2004, 2005.
IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2003.
IEEE Semiannual Vehicular Technology Conference, 2003.
IEEE International Conference on Information Technology: Research and Education, 2003.
IEEE International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing, 2001,2002.
Explainable AI with Attention Networks for Credit/Loan Decisions, Talk at the Future of FinTech - NSF CyberSmart Planning Workshop, October 2020.
Machine Learning in Spectrum Access Security, WSRD Workshop X: Security from a Wireless Spectrum Perspective: Technology Innovation and Policy Research Needs, 2018
Detecting Lies on the Internet, IEEE Conference on Information Security, Cyber Security and Privacy, Nov. 12, 2014.
Wireless & Information Systems Security, Idaho National Laboratory, January 2014
Internet Lurkers: Large-Scale Measurements and Modeling, University of California Los Angeles, December 4, 2012.
Recent Results in Cognitive Radio Network and Social Network Security, Applied Communication Sciences (formerly Telcordia), February 2012.
Securing Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) Networks: Two Examples, King's College, June 2011, London, UK.
Binary Data Hiding Game, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, October 21, 2008.
Error Correction and Encryption: Can they be combined?, Séminaire de Cryptographie, Institute of Mathematical Research of Rennes, University of Rennes 1, October 2007.
Error Correction and Encryption: Can they be combined?, Texas A&M University, September 2007.
Error Correction and Encryption: Can they be combined?, University of Texas at Arlington, September 2007.
Steganalysis of QIM-Based Data Hiding using Kernel Density Estimation", ACM Multimedia Security Workshop, September 2007.
A New Look at Wireless Security: Error Correcting Ciphers, IEEE Communications Society North Jersey Chapter Seminar, Dept. of ECEC, New Jersey Institute of Technology, February 2006.
Current Trends in Steganography, Center for Development of Advanced Computing, Kolkata, India, January 2006.
Joint Source-Channel Coding: An Alternative Method for Error Resilient Communications, IEEE Signal Processing Society Colloquium, Dept of E.E, UT-Dallas, TX, November, 2003, Sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Dallas Chapter.
Joint Source-Channel Coding for Image/Video Communications, Industry-Day, NJIT, Newark, NJ, February, 2002
Joint Source-Channel Coding for Image/Video Communications, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory,Murray Hill, NJ, February, 2002
Hiding Information: How, Where and How Much? Cyber Security Seminar Series, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, November, 2001
Alternative Methods for Error Resilient Communications, Department of E.C.E, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, October, 2001
Error Resilient Multimedia Communications, Department of E.C.E, University of Houston, Houston, TX, March, 2000
Joint source-channel decoding of variable length codes, Department of Electrical Engineering, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY, December, 1999
Joint source-channel decoding of variable length codes, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, April, 1999
Reviewer (selected list)
IEEE Transactions on Communications
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
IEEE Communications Letters
IEEE Transactions on Systems and Circuits for Video Technology
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing: Supplement on Secure Media
EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing
International Journal of Network Security
IEEE Information Theory Workshop
IEEE International Conference on Communications
IEEE International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing
Other Community Service
Stevens High School Liason Activities: Helped develop course plan for the Advanced Image Processing course for Science High Public School, Newark NJ, Summer 2002.
Participant in the 2001 Center for Talented Youth College Colloquium, funded by Johns Hopkins University and held at Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY, October 7, 2001.
Call for Papers
IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
Special Issue on New Developments in Explainable and Interpretable AI
Motivation and Introduction
Over the years, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models have steadily grown in complexity, accuracy and other quality metrics, often at the expense of interpretability of the final results. Simultaneously, researchers and practitioners have begun to realize that more transparency in the deep learning and artificial intelligence engines are necessary if the power of these engines should be adopted in practice. For example, having a very good performance metric for a disease predictor is of little use, if it is not possible to give an explanation to the end user (a physician, the patient or even the designer of the tool). Similarly, being able to understand the reasons why a model makes mistakes when it does, can add invaluable insight and is essential in critical applications.
This kind of transparency can be achieved by designing interpretable AI engines which inherently offer a window into the reasoning behind the decisions it arrives at or by designing robust post-hoc methods that can explain the decision of the AI engine.Thus, two areas of research called interpretable AI (IAI) and explainable AI (or XAI), respectively have emerged with the goal to produce models that are both well performing and understandable. Interpretable AI are models that obey some domain specific constraints so that they are better understandable by humans. In essence, they are not black-box models. On the other hand, explainable AI refers to models and methods that are typically used to explain another black-box model.
With the sizable XAI and IAI research community that has formed, there is now a key opportunity to take the field of explainable and interpretable AI to the next level, to overcome the shortcomings of current neural network explanation techniques and extend the related concepts and methods towards more widely applicable, semantically rich and actionable XAI. This special issue aims to bring together these new developments in the fascinating field of interpretable and explainable AI.
Original submissions are welcome in the topics including but not limited to:
- Explainable and interpretable AI for classification and non-classification problems (e.g., regression, segmentation, reinforcement learning)
- Explainable and interpretable state-of-the-art neural network architectures (e.g., transformers) and non-neural network models (e.g., trees, kernel-methods, clustering algorithms)
- Explainable/interpretable AI for fairness, privacy, and trustworthy models
- Novel criteria to evaluate explanation and interpretability
- Theoretical foundations of explainable/interpretable AI
- Causal mechanisms for explainable/interpretable AI
- Explainable and Interpretable AI for human-computer interaction
- Explainable and interpretable AI for applications (e.g., medical diagnosis, disaster prediction, credit underwriting, remote sensing, big data)
- Counterfactual explanations
- Human-in-the-loop explanations
Three kinds of articles can be submitted to this special issues: (1) Regular (2) Review and (3) Letters.
The special issue will follow the instructions for submission for IEEE TAI including an impact statement. Additionally, the manuscript should contain a “Interpretability/Explainability Evaluation” section. This section will include a quantification of interpretability/explainability of the proposed methods. Examples of interpretability/explainability metrics include sparsity, case-based reasoning etc. If proposing an XAI model, the authors are encouraged to include information on the goals of the explanation. For example, would the explanation provided by the model be an human understandable explanation of the black box or will it provide an approximation of a complex model.
Note that submission will be done via the manuscript central: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tai-ieee
Please select the appropriate special issue when submitting.
Submission deadlines: June 1, 2022, July 1, 2022
First round of reviews due: September 15, 2022
Revised manuscripts due: October 15, 2022
Final decision: December 15, 2022
K.P. (Suba) Subbalakshmi, Stevens Institute of Technology, USA
Wojciech Samek, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI, Germany
Xia “Ben” Hu, Rice University, USA