Muhammad Abusaqer
Ph.D., Fulbright Alumnus
Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Cybersecurity
Minot State University
Research Focus
Building trustworthy AI/NLP systems for cybersecurity applications, with emphasis on incident-centric discourse triage, data-driven intelligence, and rigorous evaluation. My work spans cyber threat intelligence from social media, harmful content detection, and reproducible benchmarking across traditional ML, transformers, and prompted LLMs.
News & Updates
Recent achievements, publications, and announcements
Jan 2026
Paper Submitted to ICML 2026
Submitted paper on controlled evaluation of prompted LLM inference vs. fine-tuned encoders for text classification under reliability and cost constraints.
2025
Ph.D. Completed
Successfully defended dissertation: 'CyberTweetGrader&Labeler: A Domain-Specific NLP Approach for Mining and Classifying Cybersecurity Discourse on Social Media' at North Dakota State University.
Jul 2025
COMPSAC 2025 Publication
Paper accepted at IEEE COMPSAC 2025: 'A Comparative Analysis of Transformer and Traditional ML Models for Cyberbullying Detection on Twitter (now X)'
2025-2026
Faculty Small Grant Funded
Received $4,000 Minot State University Faculty Small Grant for 'Expanding and Validating CyberTweetGrader&Labeler'.
Mar 2026
MICS 2026 - 3 Papers Accepted
Three student-mentored papers accepted for presentation at MICS 2026 in Eau Claire, WI on data poisoning attacks, membership inference attacks, and evasion attacks.
Oct 2025
ND EPSCoR Conference Presentations
Presented oral talk on 'CyberTweetGrader&Labeler' and poster on 'EVPN-VXLAN Made Teachable' at ND EPSCoR Annual State Conference.
Research Projects
Current and ongoing research initiatives in trustworthy AI for cybersecurity
Domain-specific NLP pipeline for prioritizing cyberattack discourse on Twitter/X. Features auditable feature engineering, relevance scoring, and labeling to support cybersecurity intelligence from noisy online text.
Comparative evaluation of transformers, traditional ML, and prompted LLM inference for harmful and abusive online text detection, emphasizing reliability, cost, and deployment trade-offs.
Joint evaluation of accuracy, throughput/latency, and GPU energy per inference for TF-IDF baselines versus fine-tuned transformers for online abuse detection.
Training-free caption-then-classify baseline for Hateful Memes with calibration-aware decision rules and efficiency analysis.
Student-mentored baseline studies on membership inference, data poisoning, and evasion attacks, resulting in multiple MICS 2026 accepted papers.
Event-focused sentiment and theme analysis around healthcare cyber incidents with time-aware collection and ML baselines.
Trustworthy Language Intelligence Lab (TLI Lab)
Focused on building externally fundable research in trustworthy AI/NLP for cybersecurity, security-relevant online text, and harmful-content analysis.
Publications
Peer-reviewed papers and technical reports
Forthcoming / Accepted
Empirical Evaluation of Data Poisoning Attacks and Practical Defenses in Supervised Learning
T. Khan, D. Alonso, and M. Abusaqer
58th Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS 2026)
Empirical Evaluation of Membership Inference Attacks on NLP Text Classifiers: A Baseline Study on SST-2
W. Novak and M. Abusaqer
58th Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS 2026)
Evasion Attacks: How Adversarial Noise Bypasses ML Classifiers
P. Hummel, R. Skabo, and M. Abusaqer
58th Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS 2026)
Published
Predicting Student Academic Performance: Using Machine Learning and Clustering
A. Pun, B. Olson, and M. Abusaqer
57th Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS), 2025
Analyzing Ransomware Incidents in Healthcare: Patterns and Risk Assessment
D. Degele and M. Abusaqer
57th Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS), 2025
Evaluating Quick-Commerce Platforms: A Sentiment and Topic Modeling Analysis of User Reviews
T. Khan and M. Abusaqer
57th Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS), 2025
Global Echoes of the FIFA World Cup 2022: Sentiment and Theme Analysis via Deep Learning and Machine Learning on Twitter
J. Jensen and M. Abusaqer
56th Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS), 2024
Education
Academic credentials and honors
Degrees
Ph.D., Computer Science
Cybersecurity & AI
North Dakota State University
Dissertation: CyberTweetGrader&Labeler: A Domain-Specific NLP Approach for Mining and Classifying Cybersecurity Discourse on Social Media
M.S., Computer Science and Applications
Virginia Tech
Fulbright Fellowship recipient
Diploma in Education
Birzeit University
Two-year, post-baccalaureate teacher-education program; completed concurrently with B.S. coursework
B.S., Mathematics
Birzeit University
Class rank: 2nd, GPA 3.6/4.0
Awards & Grants
Fulbright Fellowship
2001Competitive national selection (Palestine) for M.S. study at Virginia Tech
Minot State Faculty Small Grant
2025-2026$4,000 for expanding CyberTweetGrader&Labeler
Minot State Empower Grant
2023$6,000 for cybersecurity curriculum enhancement
Bank of Palestine (Zamalah) Grant
2015/2016$30,000 faculty development grant
Teaching Experience
Courses taught at Minot State University (2022 - Present)
CSCI 410
CSCI 415
CSCI 420
CSCI 425
CSCI 340
CSCI 330
CSCI 221
CSCI 161
CSCI 450
- Project-based teaching across cybersecurity, networking, secure web/mobile systems
- Modalities: In-person, hybrid, and online instruction
- Platforms: Blackboard Ultra, zyBooks/JBL Cloud Labs, Pearson MyLab, Cengage MindTAP
- Programming Competition Coach (DigiKey Collegiate Computing Competition, MICS)
Previous Academic Appointments
North Dakota State University
Adjunct Professor, Management Information Systems (2017-2021)
Led "Business Use of Computers" for large cohorts (450 fall / 350 spring students)
Al-Aqsa University, Palestine
Tenure-track Junior Lecturer (2006-2015)
Taught AI, CS I & II, Operating Systems, Web Programming. Led deployment of university's first Moodle LMS.
Student Mentoring
Fostering undergraduate research and publication success
16
Undergraduate Co-authors
12+
Student-Led Publications
4
Years of Mentoring
Mentored Research Projects (2022-2026)
A. Pun & B. Olson
Student success prediction via ML and clustering
D. Degele
Ransomware in healthcare: patterns and risk
T. Khan
Quick-commerce platforms: sentiment & topic modeling
T. Khan & D. Alonso
Data poisoning attacks and practical defenses in supervised learning
W. Novak
Membership inference attacks on NLP text classifiers: baseline study on SST-2
P. Hummel & R. Skabo
Evasion attacks and adversarial robustness demonstrations
J. Jensen
FIFA World Cup 2022: sentiment & themes
S. Khan & K. Khan
AI vs human text detection
T. Smith
Campus crime vs firearm policy
C. Fofie
Cyberbullying with GPT/BERT/RoBERTa
Q. Sullivan
Darknet traffic classification
A. Scott & J. T. Snow
Cybersecurity news categorization
I am committed to mentoring undergraduate researchers toward publication success, fostering an environment that promotes innovation and problem-solving in AI and cybersecurity fields. My guidance focuses on security, privacy, and trustworthy AI topics, helping students develop research skills while contributing to peer-reviewed conferences and building their academic portfolios.
Professional Experience
Career spanning academia, research, and industry
Career Timeline
Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track)
Minot State University
Minot, ND
Teaching CS & Cybersecurity courses. Research in AI/ML and NLP for security-relevant text. Mentoring undergraduate researchers toward publication (16 undergraduate coauthors).
Graduate Research Assistant / Data Scientist
Advanced Traffic Analysis Center, UGPTI, NDSU
Fargo, ND
Computer-vision development for vehicle detection, counting, and prototype 13-class classification for transportation analytics.
HPC Cyberinfrastructure Intern
Information Technology Division, NDSU
Fargo, ND
Built researcher-facing HPC tutorials and C-shell automation for Thunder and Thunder Prime supercomputers, supporting reproducible computational workflows.
Adjunct Professor, Management Information Systems
NDSU College of Business
Fargo, ND
Led 'Business Use of Computers' for large cohorts (450 fall / 350 spring students). Supervised graduate TAs for labs, grading, and logistics.
Junior Lecturer / Department Chair
Al-Aqsa University
Palestine
Taught AI, CS I & II, Operating Systems, Web Programming. Led deployment of university's first Moodle LMS. Served as Department Chair and Vice Dean of Planning & Development.
Systems Programmer & Analyst
ATS (Arab Technology Systems)
Ramallah, Palestine
Paradox/FoxPro/Oracle development, maintenance, and performance optimization for enterprise systems.
Technical Skills & Service
Technical expertise and professional contributions
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals2021
- Cisco CCNA2006
- Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE)2002
- Oracle Database OCP: 8i Certified DBA2002
- CIW Web Security Associate2013
- National Cyber League (NCL) Competitor2021
- IEEEMember
- ACMMember
Languages
Journal/Conference Reviewer
- ICML (2026)
- IEEE Access (2025)
- IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society (2025)
- IEEE BigData 2025 Workshops
Session Chair
ML for Business (MICS 2025), AI Classification (MICS 2024), Deep Learning (MICS 2023)