Principal Investigator

Dr. Luis A. Garcia

Assistant Professor

Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah

Dr. Luis Antonio Garcia is 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). He was previously a Research Assistant Professor at the USC Department of Computer Science and a Research Lead at the USC Information Sciences Institute. He held a postdoctoral appointment at the Networked & Embedded Systems Laboratory at the UCLA ECE Department, collaborating with Dr. Mani Srivastava. He has his PhD in Computer Engineering with a Cybersecurity focus from Rutgers University, where his research advisor was Dr. Saman Zonouz. His dissertation was titled 'Physics for the Sake of Security, Security for the Sake of Physics'.

Email Website LinkedIn GitHub Google Scholar

Research Statement

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.

Research 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?

Selected Publications

2025conferenceAccepted at EAI SmartSP 2025Springer LNICST

Property-Guided Cyber-Physical Reduction and Surrogation for Safety Analysis in Robotic Vehicles

Nazmus Shakib Sayom, Luis A Garcia

Security and Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems and Smart Vehicles: Third EAI International Conference, SmartSP 2025, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, December 1--2, 2025, Proceedings

This paper proposes property-guided reduction and surrogate execution for falsifying safety properties in robotic vehicle systems. The method isolates controller logic and physical dynamics relevant to a target specification, then uses lightweight surrogate models with trace analysis and temporal-logic oracles to search for safety violations.

arXiv PDF Accepted Papers Springer LNICST Publication index

2024journal

Collaborative Research: NCS: FO: Enhancing Episodic Memory through Real-world Integration of Brain Recording and Stimulation with Semantic Alignment of Human and IoT Perception

Luis A Garcia

NSF Award Number 2435642. Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering

Paper Publication index

2023journal

Collaborative Research: FMitF: Track I: A Formal Verification and Implementation Stack for Programmable Logic Controllers

Luis A Garcia

NSF Award Number 2425711. Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering

Publication index

2022journal

Collaborative Research: FMitF: Track I: A Formal Verification and Implementation Stack for Programmable Logic Controllers

Luis A Garcia

NSF Award Number 2220312. Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering

Publication index

2022journal

Distributed computing for internet of things under adversarial environments

Gowri Sankar Ramachandran, Luis A Garcia, Bhaskar Krishnamachari

IoT for Defense and National Security

Publication index

2019preprint

Method for verifying the integrity of an additive manufacturing process

Saman Zonouz, Mehdi Javanmard, Raheem Beyah, Luis A Garcia, Tuan-anh Le, Christian Bayens

Google Patents

Publication index

Education

Ph.D. Computer Engineering

Rutgers University (2019)

Cybersecurity

M.S. Computer Engineering

Rutgers University (2016)

Experience

2023-Present

Assistant Professor

University of Utah · Kahlert School of Computing

2021-2023

Research Assistant Professor

USC Department of Computer Science

2020-2023

Research Lead

USC Information Sciences Institute

2019-2021

Postdoctoral Researcher

UCLA ECE Department