Research & publications

Advancing trustworthy AI and cyber defense

My research grounds human-centric, trustworthy AI in rigorous statistical and data-science methodology, from privacy-preserving federated learning and explainability to the robustness of AI in healthcare and digital finance.

Research themes

Where my work focuses

๐Ÿง 

Explainability & Fairness

Making AI decisions transparent, fair and accountable, with calibrated uncertainty and human-AI collaboration.

๐Ÿ”’

Federated & Private Learning

Differential privacy, secure aggregation and distributed estimation for sensitive, multi-organization data.

๐Ÿฉบ

Healthcare & Critical Systems AI

Privacy-preserving diagnostics and models that remain robust under real-world distribution shift.

๐Ÿ›๏ธ

AI Governance & Regulatory Science

Evaluation protocols, assurance cases, auditing and policy frameworks for responsible AI.

๐Ÿ›ก๏ธ

AI-Driven Cybersecurity

Anomaly detection, behavioral analytics and trust-building frameworks for security decision-making.

โš”๏ธ

Adversarial Robustness

Attack taxonomies and defence mechanisms for AI in medical imaging and other high-stakes settings.

Selected research funding ยท ~MYR 800K total

Grants & projects

๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ

Explainable Federated Learning (XFL) for Multi-Hospital Fetal Health Assessment

Principal Investigator ยท European Commission (Horizon 2020) ยท MYR 300,000 ยท 2020โ€“2022.

โŒš

Privacy Framework for Health Information on Wearable & Portable Devices

Principal Investigator ยท National Research Grant (FRGS) ยท MYR 150,000 ยท 2014โ€“2017.

๐Ÿ”

Explainable AI (XAI) and Cybersecurity: Trust-Building Frameworks

Co-Investigator ยท International Research Grant ยท MYR 180,000 ยท 2023โ€“2025.

๐Ÿญ

Securing the Sustainable Future of Manufacturing

Co-Investigator ยท CREST Grant ยท MYR 200,000 ยท 2021โ€“2024.

Selected publications

Peer-reviewed work

Author shown in bold. A complete, categorised publication list is available on request and via Google Scholar.

Safavi, S., & Shukur, Z. (2014). Conceptual privacy framework for health information on wearable devices. PLoS ONE, 9(12), e114306. Q1

Safavi, S., Abdulnabi, M. S. H., Rana, M. E., & Alizadeh, S. (2025). From black box to trustworthy AI: A secure framework for explainable cybersecurity decision-making. 2025 Int. Conf. on Advancements in Smart, Secure and Intelligent Computing (ASSIC), 1โ€“4. IEEE.

Mohan, M. H., Seeboruth, K., Rana, M. E., Umar, U. S., Mohan, T., & Safavi, S. (2025). Enhancing fetal health assessment: Automated head circumference measurement via deep learning segmentation. 2025 ASSIC, 1โ€“8. IEEE.

Chandran, A. L., Samual, J., Safavi, S., & Ali, A. (2025). A comparative analysis of machine learning models for detecting malware in Android devices. Journal of Cyber Security and Risk Auditing, 4, 327โ€“346.

EL Bakkali, J., EL Bardouni, T., Safavi, S., et al. (2016). Behaviors of percentage depth dose curves: A Monte Carlo Geant4 study. Radiation Physics and Chemistry, 125, 199โ€“204. Q2

Safavi, S., Shukur, Z., & Razali, R. (2013). Reviews on cybercrime affecting portable devices. Procedia Technology, 11, 650โ€“657. Elsevier.

Safavi, S., & Shukur, Z. (2015). CenterYou: A permission-based privacy framework (pseudo-data technique) in Android. Malaysian Patent No. 710420-12-5,412. Patent

Forthcoming / under review

In the pipeline

โš”๏ธ

Adversarial Robustness in Medical-Imaging AI

Attack taxonomies and defence mechanisms. Q1, in process.

๐Ÿงฌ

Dual-Phase Brain-Tumour Segmentation

Gumbel-Softmax + cascaded Swin Transformer framework. Q1, accepted.

๐Ÿ“Š

Human-AI Collaboration for Anomaly Detection

Behavioral analytics in cybersecurity. Q2, in process.

Training & resources

Learn and publish with me

๐ŸŽ“

Workshops & Training

Hands-on workshops and video series across trustworthy AI, machine learning, intrusion detection, penetration testing and more.

Browse workshops โ†’
๐Ÿš€

Academic Accelerator Suite

My curated toolkit for the full research journey, from literature discovery to publication, impact and research ethics.

Explore the toolkit โ†’
Research collaboration

Interested in collaborating?

I welcome research partnerships, co-supervision and joint projects across trustworthy AI, federated learning and cybersecurity.

Reach out โ†’