Who am I?

Hi, I’m Aaliya.

I started in cybersecurity and cyber operations through my experiences at the Air Force Research Lab. Specifically, during one summer, I went through Griffis Institute’s ACE (Advanced Course in Engineering) which simulated the geopolitical crisis between US, China, and Taiwan.

Previously, I founded a startup and we were finalists in Microsoft’s Student Competition so we were invited to Microsoft Build to present. We went through Georgia Tech’s Create-X and The Residency where I moved to San Francisco and lived in sf2. I was surrounded by extremely passionate and ambitious founders, and I realized I wanted to focus on my engineering fundamentals. So I joined a drone startup in LA.

I then returned back to finish my undergrad at Georgia Tech where I’m currently working part-time at Georgia Tech Research Institute on hardware hacking, reverse engineering, and software defined radios. I am also doing a lot of math proofs. I’m doing research under Professor Saman Zonouz in the Cyberphysical Security Lab on extracting control logic from PLCs.

I’m extremely passionate about math. I want to apply a strong mathematical and algorithmic foundation to solve some of the hardest engineering problems we have today.

Not to mention, the neglect of cybersecurity for critical infrastructure in the United States brings risk to our strength as a nation.

And as we attempt to modernize our machinery through autonomy, we must face the costs of trying to deploy our self-created reasoning machines in an ever-complex environment. I believe this is why we need a firm foundation in the mathematics of our engineering. Will the neural network we deploy on multi-million dollar machines be able to handle a crash that leaves itself dysfunctional?

These are the questions that I believe are the most important and worth channeling my agency towards solving.