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Pretom Roy Ovi

Assistant Professor

University of North Texas

Department of Data Science

Email: pretomroy.ovi@unt.edu

Education

  • PhD, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, 2024
    Major: Information Systems
    Dissertation: "A Robust Federated Learning against Cyber Instrusions to Ensure Data Confidentiality and Model Integrity"
  • MS, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 2021
    Major: Information Systems

Teaching

Teaching Experience

    University of North Texas

  • DTSC 3010 - Introduction to Data Science, 3 courses.
  • DTSC 4221 - Applied Data Science and Machine Learning, 1 course.
  • DTSC 5505 - Machine Learning for Data Scientists, 7 courses.
  • INFO 5900 - Special Problems, 1 course.
  • INFO 6900 - Special Problems, 2 courses.

Directed Student Learning

  • Dissertation Committee Chair, Information Science. (August 2025).
  • Dissertation Committee Chair, Information Science. (August 2025).
  • Dissertation Committee Member, Computer Science and Engineering. (2025).
  • Dissertation Committee Member, Information Science. (2024).
  • Dissertation Defense Committee Member, Information Science. (2024).
  • Directed Individual/Independent Study, "Evidence guided response for large language modeling through MCP/RAG," Data Science. (January 2026 - 2026).
  • Directed Individual/Independent Study, "Targeted forgetting: Hybrid Unlearning in Federated Learning Framework," Information Science. (September 1, 2025 - December 15, 2025).

Awards and Honors

  • Editor’s Choice Article, MDPI Electronics. (2024).
  • Project on“Robotic Sensing and Perception”, Featured on CBS News, Baltimore.. (2024).
  • Best Paper Award, SPIE Defence and Commercial Sensing Conference’. (2023).
  • Best Paper Award, SPIE Defence and Commercial Sensing Conference. (2022).

Research

Published Intellectual Contributions

    Conference Proceeding

  • Ovi, P. (2023). A Comprehensive Study of Gradient Inversion Attacks in Federated Learning and Baseline Defense Strategies.
  • Ovi, P. (2023). Confident Federated Learning to Tackle Label Flipped Data Poisoning Attacks.
  • Ovi, P. (2023). Mixed Quantization Enabled Federated Learning to Tackle Gradient Inversion Attacks.
  • Ovi, P. (2022). Secured Federated Training: Detecting Compromised Nodes and Identifying the Type of Attacks.
  • Ovi, P. (2022). TinyM2Net: A Flexible System Algorithm Co-designed Multimodal Learning Framework for Tiny Devices.
  • Ovi, P. (2022). Towards Developing Data Security Aware Federated Learning for Multimodal Contested Environment.
  • Ovi, P. (2021). ARIS: A Real-Time Edge Computed Accident Risk Inference System.

Presentations Given

    Oral Presentation

  • Ovi, P. (Presenter), Data Science Day, Targeted Forgetting: Federated Unlearning, United States of America. (2025).

    • Sharing Session

  • Ovi, P. (Author & Presenter), UNT/UNT Health AI Research Retreat, Federated Learning for Healthcare, United States of America. (2025).
  • Ovi, P. (Presenter), NSF Aspiring PI Workshop, 2025., Culturally Aware AI Educational Systems, National Science Foundation, United States of America. (2025 - 2025).

Media Contributions

    Other

  • "Research Presentation/Talk at NSF PI Workshop, 2025," (December 18, 2024).

Service

University Service

  • Committee Member, Faculty Search Committee. (2026 - Present).
  • Other (Member of Judge Panel), Students’ Final Project Presentation in ‘Software Engineering for Data Science’ course. (November 2025 - Present).
  • Other (Judge), Students’ Final Project Presentation in ‘Software Engineering for Data Science’ course. (April 2025 - Present).
  • Faculty Mentor, Hackwell Hackathon 2026. (2025 - Present).
  • Committee Member, Personnel Affairs Committee. (2025 - Present).
  • Committee Member, PhD Committee. (2025 - Present).
  • Committee Member, Research and Outreach Committee. (2025 - Present).
  • Committee Member, Student Affairs Committee. (2025 - Present).
  • Co-Chair, Research Brown-Bag Committee. (2024 - Present).

Professional Service

  • Reviewer, Conference Paper, AAAI 2025 Spring Symposium. (2025 - Present).
  • Reviewer, Journal Article, Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds. (2025 - Present).
  • Reviewer, Journal Article, ACM Transactions on Internet of Things. (2024 - Present).
  • Reviewer, Journal Article, IEEE Transactions on Big Data. (2024 - Present).
  • Committee Member, Edge AI Research Symposium. (2025 - 2026).
  • Committee Member, AAAI 2025 Spring Symposium on GenAI@Edge. (March 31, 2025 - April 2, 2025).
  • Program Organizer, AAAI 2025 Spring Symposium: “GenAI@Edge: Empowering Generative AI at the Edge”. (March 31, 2025 - April 2, 2025).