FORTIS Lab

The FORTIS Lab builds methods, benchmarks, and open-source tools for AI auditing — making AI systems inspectable, safe, and accountable. We investigate how AI systems can produce traceable evidence of their behavior, support meaningful audit after deployment, and satisfy checkable safety and policy requirements in real-world settings.

FORTIS stands for Foundations for Observable, Robust, and Trustworthy Intelligent Systems. Drawing on the Latin word fortis — “strong” or “resilient” — this work spans three connected directions: how to inspect and evaluate AI systems (auditing and assurance), what failure modes and attack surfaces to audit for (safety and security), and where accountability is not optional (science and society). More recently, we have also started studying the evaluation, transferability, and guardrails of agent skills within broader agent systems.

1. Openings and Candidate Fit I may recruit Ph.D. student for Fall 2027 -- it will be very different due to the funding constraints (see below). For research interns, we have two narrow tracks: USC students on-campus, and other North American institutions with demonstrated research output.

• Research Focus: Candidates should align with my core research areas. For details, please visit my research interests.
  Update (Apr 2026): For Fall 2027, due to funding reasons, my lab will rely on fellowship offers but no RA offers (which require an impossible amount of funding). Thus, this year we can only recommend candidates for fellowship but the fellowship committee will make the final decision. This requires applicants to have high GPAs (3.7+) and reasonably good English test scores (TOEFL 100+) for committee review. Of course, a good number of papers are also expected.
• Prerequisites for Ph.D.: Successful candidates typically have:
  • A publication record comparable to our current 1st-year Ph.D. students (see FORTIS Lab members).
  • Strong programming skills, demonstrated through research projects or significant open-source contributions.
  • Strong interest in open-source, and willingness to build research tools and demos.
• Prerequisites for Research Interns: Successful candidates typically have:
  • Strong programming skills, demonstrated through research projects or significant open-source contributions.
  • I do not host in-person summer interns -- I work remotely in summer.

2. Why Join FORTIS

Compensation. Ph.D. students will receive full support outlined by the CS department (tuition waiver + stipend; currently $45,619 based on 2026-2027 funding offers). TA is always guaranteed before the 5th year, and we will try to get you as many fellowship and RA years as possible. For high-performing master/undergraduate researchers, we may consider hourly pay on a case-by-case basis. Remote intern payment remains constrained by USC policy. Please consider this before reaching out.

Compute Resources.

• fortis-prima (deployed Nov 2023): dual AMD EPYC 7763 ("Milan"), 1TB DDR4 memory (64×16GB), 15TB SSD, and 8× NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPUs.
• fortis-nova (deployed Fall 2025): supports up to 8× NVIDIA RTX 6000 Blackwell Max-Q GPUs (96GB each, released in 2025); launched with 4 GPUs, with expansion to 8 GPUs planned in 2026/27.
• fortis-Spark (incoming in May 2026): 2× compact desk-side AI systems built on the GB10 Grace-Blackwell superchip, each with a 20-core ARM CPU, Blackwell GPU, 128GB unified memory, NVMe SSD, and up to 1 PFLOP FP4 AI compute.
• Cloud/API support: we provide LLM API credits, and our cloud resources primarily include AWS credits and NSF access to support large-scale experimentation.

3. How to Apply - For all positions, please fill out this Google Form: Application Form and also email the following details (subject line: "Interested in PhD/Intern at Fall 27"): Magic Words to fortis@usc.edu - please include Trojan in the email title to demonstrate that you have read these instructions carefully.

• CV: Provide a concise summary of your background and your future plans.
• Why FORTIS?: Mention any of my research papers or topics that have caught your interest. Additionally, feel free to propose new topics you are interested in exploring. I am always open to innovative ideas and fresh perspectives.