I am a PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington working with Dr. Yulia Tsvetkov and Dr. Luke Zettlemoyer. I am honored to have been awarded the Allen CSE Research Fellowship and to be a 2026-2029 ARCS Scholar. My research interests lie at the intersection of model robustness, security, and transparency with a focus on building NLP systems resilient to adversarial attacks. I have led studies investigating Unicode perturbation detection, text normalization, AI-optimized case selection for content moderation, and malicious text-to-image prompt mitigation. My work reflects a deep-rooted enthusiasm for creating safer, more trustworthy AI systems.
The Lies Characters Tell: Utilizing Large Language Models to Normalize Adversarial Unicode Perturbations Portia Cooper, Eduardo Blanco, and Mihai Surdeanu. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025. pp. 18932-18944. Read paper
Hiding in Plain Sight: Tweets with Hate Speech Masked by Homoglyphs Portia Cooper, Mihai Surdeanu, and Eduardo Blanco. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023. pp. 2922-2929. Read paper
