Heather Broome

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Dr. H Chad Lane. I am part of the INVITE Institute, an NSF-funded AI research institute focused on developing intelligent learning technologies. I am also a member of AI Interpretability @ Illinois, a cross-lab research group studying interpretable architectures, mechanisms, and behaviors in AI systems.

My research focuses on improving the reliability and transparency of large language models for educational applications.

Before Illinois, I earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern Mississippi, where I worked in the Cyber Innovations Lab on ML-based cybersecurity.

Reach me at hbroome [at] illinois [dot] edu.

news

Apr 01, 2026	Selected as a 2026 AIVO AI4Ed Summer Fellow — a Google.org-funded cross-institute research initiative on AI in education.
Oct 31, 2025	Received the Fiddler Innovation Graduate Student Fellowship Award.
Aug 19, 2024	Started my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, joining the INVITE Institute under Dr. H. Chad Lane.

selected publications

SEDE

Adversarial Attack Optimization and Evaluation for Machine Learning-based Dark Web Traffic Analysis

N. Harrison, H. Broome, Y. Shrestha, and 3 more authors

In 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE), 2024

Abs DOI Bib HTML

@inproceedings{harrison2024adversarial,
  title = {Adversarial Attack Optimization and Evaluation for Machine Learning-based Dark Web Traffic Analysis},
  author = {Harrison, N. and Broome, H. and Shrestha, Y. and Robles, A. and Gautam, A. and Rahimi, N.},
  booktitle = {33rd International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE)},
  pages = {3--13},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-75201-8_1},
}

CSCI

SMS Malware Detection: A Machine Learning Approach

H. Broome, Y. Shrestha, N. Harrison, and 1 more author

In 2022 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI), 2022

Abs DOI Bib HTML

@inproceedings{broome2022sms,
  title = {{SMS} Malware Detection: A Machine Learning Approach},
  author = {Broome, H. and Shrestha, Y. and Harrison, N. and Rahimi, N.},
  booktitle = {2022 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)},
  pages = {937--942},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.1109/CSCI58124.2022.00167},
}