Dorde Popovic received his BSc degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, in 2022. He was honored with the Andrew Carnegie Scholar award at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Outstanding Academic Achievement award for graduating first in his class. He is currently a research assistant at Qatar Computing Research Institute. His research interests include backdoor attacks and defenses in deep learning, robust machine learning, security of LLMs, federated learning, and the ethics of AI.

Before joining QCRI, Dorde’s research focused on federated learning and edge computing. His senior thesis was published at IEEE CloudCom 2022 and was the runner-up for the Allen Newell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research at Carnegie Mellon University. Dorde also served as a research assistant in Dr. Ihab Younis’ laboratory, where he worked on bioinformatics and genetics research. His research project on alternative splicing in breast cancer won second place for the Best Project Award at the Meeting of the Minds Research Symposium.

At present, his research projects focus on backdoor attacks and defenses in deep learning, as well as building more robust deep learning models and evaluating the security of LLMs. Alongside his collaborators, Dorde developed a detection technique for backdoor attacks that won second place and received the data-efficiency award in the Trojan Detection Challenge at NeurIPS 2022. Dorde also developed aiXamine, a platform for evaluating the safety and security of LLMs.