Habiba Farrukh Earns NSF CAREER Award
Habiba Farrukh, assistant professor of computer science at the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), has been recognized with a 2026 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. NSF CAREER Awards support “early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization…to build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research,” states NSF. Farrukh was honored for her project “Towards Secure and Trustworthy Collaborative Immersive Systems” and will receive $600,000 over five years.
Before arriving at ICS, Farrukh earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University. Her research interests focus on security and privacy challenges that arise as computing platforms evolve. Her proposed research will contribute to a real-time security framework for collaborative immersive systems where humans and AI agents share a common environment and actions carry real-world consequences. She leads the Security and Privacy of Emerging Computing Technology (SPECT) Lab. Farrukh has earned accolades for publications, including ICS Research Award for “On the Security and Privacy of Emerging Computing Platforms.” Recently, she led a student team to become the 2026 CPTC Global Champions.
Here, Farrukh shares insights on her research.
How would you describe your research?
My research focuses on the security and privacy challenges that emerge as computing platforms evolve, examining them from both a systems and human-centered perspective. Modern computing has continuously expanded the ways humans interact with technology and with each other, from keyboards and touchscreens to voice assistants and wearables that sense our bodies and surroundings, and each evolution has introduced new security challenges that require new thinking. Immersive technologies represent the next frontier in this evolution, and this project will address the security challenges they introduce.
By seamlessly merging physical and digital worlds, augmented, virtual, and mixed reality platforms enable a fundamentally new mode of interaction, one where multiple users can inhabit and manipulate a shared three-dimensional space in real time through natural embodied actions like gaze and gesture. These platforms are becoming the interface layer for human-machine teaming in healthcare, education, autonomous systems, and robotics. Unlike traditional computing, where users interact independently through a screen, immersive environments make every participant a physical presence in a shared space. The system’s state emerges from the composed actions of all participants, meaning a single user’s behavior directly shapes what every other participant sees and experiences. The system continuously captures intimate data about users’ bodies, gaze, movement, and surroundings to make this possible, creating a direct manipulation of users’ shared sensory experience that existing security models were simply not designed to handle.
This project will secure collaborative immersive systems by developing formal models of embodied collaborative behavior to systematically discover threats that impact users’ physical and cognitive safety and privacy, designing trust mechanisms that verify and continuously maintain the identity of participants without disrupting the sense of presence, and building frameworks for tracking the integrity of shared interactions and enforcing security policies in real time.
What real-world impact does it have?
As immersive technologies mature, they will enable new forms of collaboration not just between humans, but between humans and the AI agents and autonomous systems around them. For instance, a physician might examine a patient’s anatomy alongside an AI diagnostic assistant in a shared three-dimensional space, a team of operators might supervise autonomous robots from inside a live manufacturing plant, or NASA engineers on Earth might guide astronauts through critical repairs on the ISS from inside a shared spatial view of the station. In all of these settings, the integrity of the shared environment is a precondition for safety, not an optional feature.
These environments introduce security and privacy risks that are fundamentally different from those in traditional computing. A malicious participant can manipulate what others see and experience, compromise the integrity of shared interactions, or exploit the rich continuous streams of biometric and behavioral data these systems capture. A principled security framework for these systems would enable users and developers to detect and prevent these threats, establish and maintain trust throughout a collaborative session, and enforce safety policies without disrupting the experience, making it possible to deploy these technologies confidently in the domains where they matter most. Beyond immersive platforms, the principles developed in this project will contribute to securing any real-time collaborative system where humans and AI agents share a common environment and actions carry real-world consequences.
What does winning the NSF CAREER Award mean to you?
This award will help me pursue my long-term research vision of designing principled security and privacy frameworks that are both technically rigorous and practically deployable, equipping users and developers of emerging computing platforms with the tools they need without forcing them to choose between functionality and safety. The security foundations for immersive systems need to be built now, before these technologies become deeply embedded in critical infrastructure and before the cost of getting it wrong becomes too high. The CAREER award is designed exactly for this kind of long-term, foundational investment, and I am grateful for the opportunity.
The systems that will mediate our most critical collaborations in medicine, education, defense, and beyond will increasingly be immersive, embodied, and shared. Getting their security right shapes whether people can trust the environments where they learn, work, and make consequential decisions. I am very excited about working on these problems with my students and sharing these findings with the practitioners, developers, and policymakers who are building and regulating these technologies today.
– Tonya Becerra