Shirley (Shaghayegh) Shajarian
AI and Security Researcher @ North Carolina A&T State University
📍 Raleigh, NC, USA.
Hey, thanks for stopping by! 👋
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at North Carolina A&T State University, advised by Dr. Sajad Khorsandroo and Dr. Mahmoud Abdelsalam in the Autonomous Cybersecurity and Resilience (ACR) Lab. I expect to graduate in May 2027.
My research lies at the intersection of cybersecurity, networking, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on generative and agentic AI for network security. Security tools are good at raising alerts, but analyzing an attack, finding its root cause, and deciding how to fix it still fall to human analysts. I build LLM-driven multi-agent systems that take on those steps, grounded in real network state, so that networks can defend and manage themselves while staying transparent to the people who run them. My dissertation, Towards Autonomous Network Security Operations: A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for LLM-Driven Network Traffic Analysis, develops this approach.
I also enjoy teaching and mentoring. I taught Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as the sole instructor and mentored an M.S. student through her thesis. More on my teaching.
Outside of research, you will usually find me in nature photographing sunsets, baking treats to share, or lost in a good book.
News
| Oct 13, 2026 | 📝 My paper “Agentic AI at the Edge: Self-Explaining Autonomous Framework for IoT Incident Response” is now published at the ACM S3 Workshop at MobiCom 2026! Read it here. |
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| Oct 13, 2026 | 🏆 Honored to receive the NSF Student Travel Grant and the N2Women Travel Award for ACM MobiCom 2026! |
| Oct 07, 2026 | 📰 The N.C. A&T College of Engineering featured my Best Poster Award at the ACM SIGCOMM 2026 N2Women workshop! Read the post. |
| Aug 27, 2026 | 🥇 Honored to win the Best Poster Award at the SIGCOMM N2Women! |
| Aug 27, 2026 | 🏆 Thrilled to receive the ACM SIGCOMM N2Women Travel Grant Award! |
| Jun 15, 2026 | 🤝 Honored to serve on the Technical Program Committees of ACM SIGCSE Virtual 2026 and the ACM S3 Workshop at MobiCom 2026! |
| Apr 15, 2026 | 🎓 One step closer! I defended my dissertation proposal and officially became a PhD candidate. |
| Jan 20, 2026 | 📝 Excited to share that my paper “ReGAIN: Retrieval-Grounded AI Framework for Network Traffic Analysis” has been accepted at ICNC 2026 (27% acceptance rate)! Read the preprint here. |
| Dec 10, 2025 | 🌐 Just wrapped up an amazing experience volunteering at ACM HotNets 2025 in College Park, Maryland! |
| Dec 05, 2025 | ⚖️ Served as a judge at NSBE 2025 Fall Regional Conference for the AI Impact-A-Thon and Academic Technical Bowl competitions. |
| Oct 15, 2025 | 🎤 I had the honor of presenting my research at the AUCC Data Science Initiative today. |
| Sep 25, 2025 | 🎓 So proud to share that Kennedy Marsh, whom I’ve been mentoring for the past 9 months, successfully defended her master’s thesis on “RAG-Enhanced LLMs for Network Traffic Analysis” today! |
| Sep 20, 2025 | 👩💻 Served as a reviewer for Grace Hopper Celebration 2025, evaluating 30+ workshop and presentation proposals on AI and Cybersecurity. |
| Sep 12, 2025 | 🤖 Featured in an AIhub interview discussing my research on Intelligent Network Management and Generative AI for modern computer networks. Read the interview. |
| Aug 10, 2025 | 📚 Honored to be recognized as a reviewer for multiple prestigious journals including IEEE Access, Scientific Reports, and PeerJ Computer Science. |
| May 15, 2025 | 📄 Our survey paper “Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for Malware Analysis: A Survey of Techniques, Applications, and Open Challenges” has been published in IEEE Access! |
| May 07, 2025 | 🎓 Presented my research at the 14th Annual Dr. Bala Ram Graduate Research Poster Competition at N.C. A&T College of Engineering. |
| Jan 08, 2025 |  This semester I am the instructor of the “AI and Machine Learning” course at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. |
| Jan 04, 2025 |  I am honored to receive the AAAI 2025 Travel Grant! |
| Dec 04, 2024 |  My poster “Intelligent Network Management: RAG-Enhanced LLMs for Log Analysis, Troubleshooting, and Documentation” has been published in CoNEXT ‘24: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies. Link |
| Nov 10, 2024 |  I am honored to be one of two U.S.-based awardees of a $1,400 travel grant for ACM CoNEXT 2024! |
| Nov 06, 2024 |  My doctoral proposal has been accepted and will be presented at the 39th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), one of the leading conferences in Artificial Intelligence! Link |
| Oct 06, 2024 |  I am excited to announce that our work, “Intelligent Network Management: RAG-Enhanced LLMs for Log Analysis, Troubleshooting, and Documentation,” has been accepted at ACM CoNEXT 2024. Link |
| Sep 29, 2024 |  I am excited to share that our new paper, “Explainable Malware Analysis: Concepts, Approaches, and Challenges,” is now available on arXiv. Link |
| Jul 26, 2024 |  My latest research paper, titled “Transfer Learning with ResNet50 for Malicious Domains Classification Using Image Visualization,” has been published in Discover Artificial Intelligence journal. Link |
| May 06, 2024 |  I have successfully passed my doctoral research examination, the second milestone in my PhD journey at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. |
| Mar 01, 2024 |  I have successfully passed all my doctoral qualifying exams! |
| Jan 12, 2023 |  I have started my PhD Program in Computer Science at NCAT! |