Foad Namjoo
Computer Science PhD student at the Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah, advised by Professor Jeff Phillips in the UtahDB Lab — PhD expected May 2028. I work on LLM interpretability and activation steering (contrast datasets), high-dimensional statistics (dKS), and wearable health sensing (MotionPI).
News
- Preprint New on arXiv: Judging by the Cover — a six-feature surface probe that never reads the question separates TruthfulQA's correct from incorrect answers at AUC 0.715; Audit-Prune removes the leakage and we release TruthfulQA-476. Sep 2026
- Datasets Released TruthfulQA-476 on Hugging Face — a surface-cleaned subset of binary-choice TruthfulQA (476 of 790 pairs, Apache-2.0), with two held-out evaluation sets, SurfaceFlipped-131 and Natural-131. Sep 2026
- Published The MotionPI system paper is out in Springer LNICST vol. 699, pp. 283–293 — the secure, resilient design behind an NIH-funded field study collecting wearable and survey data in the wild. Sep 2, 2026
- Accepted Sampling for Region-Aggregated Spatial Scan Statistics was accepted as a full paper at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026 — 58 of 248 submissions. To be presented in Riverside. Code. Aug 2026
- Preprint New on arXiv: Sampling for Region-Aggregated Spatial Scan Statistics — replacing each region with 20–50 sampled points restores the statistical power that centroid-collapsing discards. Code. Jul 1, 2026
- Release Released dKS — a fast, header-only C++ library with Python bindings (
import dks) for the multi-dimensional Kolmogorov–Smirnov distance, with both exact and near-linear-time algorithms. Paper · Code. Jun 15, 2026 - Visit Visited Martian AI, a startup building LLM model routers, for a research day of talks on interpretability, steering, and evaluation. Jan 16, 2026
- Presentation Presented the MotionPI paper at the SmartSP 2025 conference. Dec 1, 2025
- Datasets Released three contrast datasets on Hugging Face. Nov 12, 2025
- Poster Presented dKS research at the Utah AI Summit 2025. Jun 18, 2025