Akanksha Atrey
Akanksha Atrey Research Scientist
Software and Data Systems Research Lab
Nokia Bell Labs
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About Me

I am a Research Scientist in the Software and Data Systems Research Lab at Nokia Bell Labs, where I work at the intersection of AI/ML systems, distributed infrastructure, and Web3 technologies. My current focus is on designing AI infrastructure and system abstractions for efficient deployment across heterogeneous compute environments.

I received my PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I was advised by Professor Prashant Shenoy. My PhD thesis focused on enabling privacy and trust in edge AI systems. My prior research has spanned over building systems for machine learning that enable explainability and generalizability, building trustworthy and privacy-preserving ML systems, and designing machine learning solutions for ubiquitous computing.

Before graduate school, I was a software engineer at IBM, working on the z/OS mainframe. I hold a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University at Albany, SUNY.


Research Interests


Recent News

  • [Oct 2025] Our paper titled “Can Large Language Models Learn Formal Logic? A Data-Driven Training and Evaluation Framework” has been accepted at the MATH-AI Workshop at NeurIPS 2025.
  • [Jan 2025] Our paper titled “Trust or Bust: A Survey of Threats in Decentralized Wireless Networks” has been accepted at the Workshop on Security and Privacy of Next-Generation Networks at NDSS 2025.
  • [Nov 2023] I joined Nokia Bell Labs as a Researcher.
  • [Sep 2023] I successfully defended my PhD thesis!
  • [Sep 2023] Our paper titled “W4-Groups: Modeling the Who, What, When and Where of Group Behavior Via Mobility Sensing” has been accepted at the ACM CSCW 2024.
  • [Sep 2023] Our paper titled “SODA: Protecting Proprietary Information in On-Device Machine Learning Models” has been accepted at the ACM/IEEE SEC 2023.
  • [Aug 2023] I was selected as a Machine Learning and Systems Rising Star in the 2023 cohort.
  • [Jan 2023] I was awarded the CICS Dissertation Writing Fellowship.
  • [Oct 2022] I passed my Thesis Proposal Defense.
  • [Sep 2022] We were awarded the Adobe Research Gift Grant to pursue our work on proprietary information in on-device models.
  • [Mar 2022] Our short paper titled “Towards Preserving Server-Side Privacy of On-Device Models” has been accepted at The Web Conference (WWW) 2022.
  • [Feb 2022] I will be joining Adobe Research as a Research Scientist Intern this summer.
  • [Oct 2021] Our paper titled “Measuring and Characterizing Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning” has been accepted at Applied AI Letters.
  • [Oct 2021] I was awarded the 2020-2021 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award by CICS, UMass Amherst.
  • [May 2021] I was awarded the Dean’s Outstanding Anti-Racism Leadership Award by CICS, UMass Amherst.