Erin Lanus

Erin Lanus

Research Assistant Professor, Intelligent Systems Division

Erin Lanus is a research assistant professor in the Intelligent Systems Division of the Virginia Tech National Security Institute and affiliate faculty of Computer Science at Virginia Tech.

Her research centers on testing for trust and assurance of computer systems, especially systems employing artificial intelligence and machine learning. Her current focus is combinatorial testing applications spanning anonymity to artificial intelligence to autonomy, designing metrics and computational search algorithms for building test sets with different coverage related properties, and test methods to address safety and security challenges presented by the deployment of AI/ML. Prior work in cyber security involved formal methods for cryptographic protocol analysis and combinatorial approaches to anonymity in attribute-based access control.

She earned a B.A. in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Arizona State University. Her experience includes work as a High Confidence Software and Systems Researcher in the Department of Defense, as a Trustworthy AI Researcher at the MITRE Corporation, and as Research Fellow in the Protocol Analysis Lab at University of Maryland Baltimore County.