Home - Faris Bugra Kokulu
Me

About


I am a researcher with a background in computer science, human factors, and machine learning. I have spent years studying how people interact with complex systems, interviewing practitioners, designing studies, and turning findings into actionable insights, with work published at ACM CCS, NDSS, and IEEE S&P. More recently I have worked hands-on with AI, building LLM and vision-language model pipelines to study how models behave.

Research


I research how people use systems and where those systems fail them, and how AI models behave. My earlier work bridges human factors and security, using qualitative and mixed methods to uncover insights for safer, more human-centered systems.

I have since built an end-to-end LLM inference and evaluation pipeline (Python, transformers, PyTorch) on A100 GPUs, working with open-source models such as Llama, Qwen, and Mistral, vision-language models including LLaVA and Llama 3.2 Vision, and closed APIs like GPT, Claude, and Gemini.

PUBLICATIONS


Above and Beyond: Organizational Efforts to Complement U.S. Digital Security Compliance Mandates (pdf) (bibtex)
Rock Stevens*, Faris Bugra Kokulu*, Adam Doupé, and Michelle L. Mazurek
*Co-first authors
Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), February, 2022.


"Watching over the shoulder of a professional": Why Hackers Make Mistakes and How They Fix Them (pdf) (bibtex)
Irina Ford, Ananta Soneji, Faris Bugra Kokulu, Jayakrishna Vadayath, Zion Leonahenahe, Gaurav Vipat, Adam Doupé, Ruoyu Wang, Gail-Joon Ahn, Tiffany Bao, and Yan Shoshitaishvili
Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May, 2024.


From Victims to Defenders: An Exploration of the Phishing Attack Reporting Ecosystem (pdf) (bibtex)
Zhibo Sun, Faris Bugra Kokulu, Penghui Zhang, Adam Oest, Gianluca Stringhini, Tiffany Bao, Ruoyu Wang, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doupé, and Gail-Joon Ahn
Proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID), September, 2024.


Education



Doctoral research in Computer Science
Arizona State University; Tempe, AZ
2016 – 2025


Master of Computer Science (MCS)
Arizona State University; Tempe, AZ
December 2015


B.S. in Computer Engineering
Eastern Mediterranean University; Cyprus
January 2012