Palvi Aggarwal

Assistant Professor

Office: CCSB 3.1014

Email: {paggarwal}at{utep.edu}

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at El Paso. Before that, I was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. I completed my Ph.D. in the area of cyber security at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, India. My research interests broadly include the application of human factors and cognitive modeling to cybersecurity and human-machine teaming. I design and develop human-subject experiments and cognitive models to understand the behavioral aspects of cybersecurity actors i.e., attackers, defenders, and end-users to develop better defense algorithms and safe cyberspace.
Hiring: I am currently hiring competitive Ph.D. and M.S. students who are interested in cybersecurity, human factors, and cognitive modeling. If you're interested, please share your CV via email expressing your interest.

Research Publications (selected)

Aggarwal, P., Rubaiyet Nowmi, S., Du, Y., & Gonzalez, C. (2024). Evidence of Cognitive Biases in Cyber Attackers from An Empirical Study. In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 934-943).
Sharma, M., Singh, K., Aggarwal, P., & Dutt, V. (2023, July). How well does GPT phish people? An investigation involving cognitive biases and feedback. In 2023 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW) (pp. 451-457). IEEE.
Singh, K., Aggarwal, P., Rajivan, P., & Gonzalez, C. (2023). Cognitive elements of learning and discriminability in anti-phishing training. Computers & Security, 103105.
Aggarwal, P., Thakoor, O., Jabbari, S., Cranford, E. A., Lebiere, C., Tambe, M., & Gonzalez, C. (2022). Designing effective masking strategies for cyberdefense through human experimentation and cognitive models. Computers & Security, 117, 102671.
Aggarwal, P., Gutierrez, M., Kiekintveld, C. D., Bošanský, B., & Gonzalez, C. (2021). Evaluating Adaptive Deception Strategies for Cyber Defense with Human Adversaries. Game Theory and Machine Learning for Cyber Security, 77-96.
Aggarwal, P., Du, Y., Singh, K., & Gonzalez, C. (2021). Decoys in Cybersecurity: An Exploratory Study to Test the Effectiveness of 2-sided Deception. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.11037.
Cranford, E. A., Gonzalez, C., Aggarwal, P., Tambe, M., Cooney, S., & Lebiere, C. (2021). Towards a Cognitive Theory of Cyber Deception. Cognitive Science, 45(7), e13013.
Aggarwal, P., Thakoor, O., Mate, A., Tambe, M., Cranford, E. A., Lebiere, C., & Gonzalez, C. (2020, December). An exploratory study of a masking strategy of cyberdeception using cybervan. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 64, No. 1, pp. 446-450). Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.
Aggarwal, P., Moisan, F., Gonzalez, C., & Dutt, V. (2020). Learning About the Effects of Alert Uncertainty in Attack and Defend Decisions via Cognitive Modeling. Human Factors, 0018720820945425.
Aggarwal, P., Gautam, A., Agarwal, V., Gonzalez, C., & Dutt, V. (2019, July). Hackit: a human-in-the-loop simulation tool for realistic cyber deception experiments. In International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (pp. 109-121). Springer, Cham.

For more updates, please check my Google Scholar page.