PhD Student in Computer Science · Data Science · Trustworthy AI

Building secure, intelligent, and privacy-aware AI systems.

I am Malithi Mithsara, a PhD student at Southern Illinois University. My work focuses on human activity recognition, language models, sensing systems, and security challenges such as data poisoning, adversarial attacks, and prompt injection.

Malithi Mithsara

Academic Profile

Education

PhD in Computer Science at Southern Illinois University with a 4.00/4.00 GPA.

Research Focus

Trustworthy LLM/SLM-integrated sensing systems for healthcare, smart environments, and wearable AI.

Awards

Recipient of the GPSC Travel and Conference Award and IEEE BSN Travel Award.

Research Interests

My research explores how large and small language models can interpret complex sensor data for real-time human activity analysis while improving robustness, privacy, and trust. I study vulnerabilities in AI-enabled sensing systems, including data poisoning, adversarial examples, and prompt injection attacks, and design methods for safer and more reliable AI pipelines.

Machine LearningDeep LearningLarge Language ModelsSmall Language ModelsHuman Activity RecognitionSecurity and PrivacyPythonJavaWeb DevelopmentData Science

Publications

Breaking Sensor-Text Alignment: Cross-Modal Attack on Contrastive Multimodal Human Activity Recognition, CVPR 2026.
Development of a Fall Detection and Safety Communication System Using Small Language Models, ISARC 2025.
Zero-Shot Detection and Sanitization of Data Poisoning Attacks in Wearable AI Using Large Language Models, ICMLA 2024.
Intelligent Fall Detection and Emergency Response for Smart Homes Using Language Models, ICMLA 2024.
Large Language Model Integrated Healthcare Cyber-Physical Systems Architecture, COMPSAC 2024.

Experience

Graduate Assistant

Southern Illinois University

Jan 2024 – Present

Teaching assistant for computer science courses and researcher working on LLMs, SLMs, multimodal sensing, and trustworthy AI systems.

Assistant Lecturer

Informatics Institute of Technology

Aug 2023 – Dec 2023

Taught programming, computer systems, software development, and mathematics for data science students.

Temporary Lecturer

Rajarata University of Sri Lanka

Aug 2021 – Aug 2023

Taught web development, operating systems, and management information systems while supervising final-year research projects.

Let’s connect

I am interested in collaborations in data science, trustworthy AI, wearable sensing, healthcare AI, and security-focused machine learning.