Leadership Team

Becca Lynch	Position: Steering Committee Affiliation: NVIDIA Expertise: AI Red Teaming, Applied ML, Offensive Security Research Bio: Becca is an Offensive Security Researcher on NVIDIA’s AI Red Team, where she breaks ML models and systems. Her prior work at Cisco includes applied machine learning for anomaly detection and leveraging data science expertise for threat hunting and intelligence. Becca earned her B.S. in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Michigan, and her M.S. in Data Science from the University of Illinois. Her work has been presented at Black Hat USA, DEFCON AI Village, and CAMLIS.
Emanuel Gawrieh	Position: R&D Labs Lead Affiliation: Google Expertise: AI Systems Security, Security Engineering and Architecture Bio: Emanuel Gawrieh is a Senior Security Engineer at Google, where he specializes in securing workloads in hybrid, distributed architectures for public sector customers and is part of the Secure AI Framework (SAIF) team advising on hardware and infrastructure security for AI Systems. Emanuel’s has over 10 years of experience securing high performance workloads with unique hardware and infrastructure requirements across compliance regimes, and - more recently - has been working with the AI Village to prove out hardware and infrastructure configurations aiming at more efficient infrastructure for model serving, red and purple teaming, and acceleration methods best suited to the context. Emanuel has a background in public policy. He attended Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. after studying Philosophy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Lauren Putvin	Position: Steering Committee Lead Bio: Lauren Putvin began her security journey as a data scientist in GRC creating data driven security metrics and policy changes. She has most recently worked in security product development at various companies. She has a PhD in biomedical engineering (classifying sensor data).
Ravin Kumar	Position: Steering Committee Member Affiliation: Google Expertise: Applied Generative Modeling Bio: Ravin is a probabilistic programming enthusiast. He brings applied experience as a data scientist at Google with prior experience at companies like SpaceX and Sweetgreen. Ravin contributes frequently to Open Source projects such as PyMC. He also is an educator, having published textbooks and courses on the topic. Previously, Ravin worked at SpaceX and Sweetgreen using Bayesian Statistics to assess and improve orbital rocket launches and optimize avocado preparation (among many other ingredients). He now works on the Labs team at Google on large scale generative models, with a focus on safety and security. Ravin received his Bachelors and Masters in Engineering from Cal Poly Pomona and University of Wisconsin Madison respectively.
Rich Harang	Position: CFP Lead, Steering Committee Member Affiliation: NVIDIA Expertise: Network Intrusion Detection, ML for Offense Bio: Rich Harang is a Principal Security Architect at NVIDIA, specializing in ML/AI systems, with over a decade of experience at the intersection of computer security, machine learning, and privacy. He received his PhD in Statistics from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2010. Prior to joining NVIDIA, he led the Algorithms Research team at Duo, led research on using machine learning models to detect malicious software, scripts, and web content at Sophos AI, and worked as a Team Lead at the US Army Research Laboratory. His research interests include adversarial machine learning, addressing bias and uncertainty in machine learning, and ways to use machine learning to support human analysis. Richard’s work has been presented at USENIX, BlackHat, IEEE S&P workshops, and DEF CON AI Village, among others, and has also been featured in The Register and KrebsOnSecurity.
Sven Cattell	Position: Founder, GRT3 Lead Affiliation: nbhd.ai Expertise: ML Defense, Geometric data analysis Bio: Sven founded the AI Village in 2018 and has been running it ever since. He was the principal organizer of AIV’s Generative Red Team at DEFCON 31. Sven is also the founder of nbhd.ai, a startup focused on the security and integrity of datasets and the AI they build. He was previously a senior data scientist at Elastic where he built the malware model training pipeline. He has a PhD in Algebraic Topology, and a postdoc in geometric machine learning where he focused on anomaly and novelty detection.
Will Pearce	Position: CTF Lead, Steering Committee Member Affiliation: NVIDIA Expertise: ML Threat Detection Bio: Will Pearce is one of the founders of dreadnode.io a startup that is building AI cyber ranges. He focuses on attacking machine learning systems and developing ML-enabled red team capabilities. Previously, he was Senior Security Researcher on the AI Red Team at NVIDIA and the Red Team Lead for the Azure Trustworthy ML team at Microsoft, and a Senior Security Consultant at Silent Break Security. His work on offensive machine learning has appeared at industry conferences including Blackhat, Defcon AI Village, WWHF, DerbyCon, LabsCon, and academic appearances at the SAI Conference on Computing and IEEE.