TDAI Core Faculty member Dr. Huan Sun, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and a College of Engineering Innovation Scholar at Ohio State, has been selected by Schmidt Sciences to join its $10 million AI Safety Science initiative. This marks the first time an Ohio State researcher has secured funding through Schmidt Sciences’ highly competitive research program.

Her selected project will explore how to defend multimodal computer-use agents—AI systems that autonomously complete tasks such as file management and web browsing—from adversarial attacks, ensuring they perform reliably and safely in real-world environments. She will collaborate with fellow OSU researchers Yu Su and Zhiqiang Lin on this project.

Dr. Sun’s broader research focuses on natural language processing, machine learning, and AI, with a special emphasis on large language models and AI agents. Her work has led to the development of tools like Mind2Web, SeeAct, MMMU, TableLlama, and Grokked Transformer, which contribute to advancing safe and interpretable AI systems.

Before joining Ohio State, Dr. Sun earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara, completed a visiting scientist appointment at the University of Washington, and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Information Science from USTC.

📖 Read the full story on the College of Engineering’s website