I’m a PhD candidate at CMU working with Prof. Nicolas Christin. I am also a research consultant at Microsoft Research, working with Madeleine Daepp. In the fall, I will be joining Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) as a postdoctoral fellow. I will be primarily working with Manoel Horta Ribeiro.
I study how reputation and other profile signals in online platforms can be used to enable or stifle abuse (e.g., scams, hate, disinformation, etc.). More recently, I’ve been exploring the illicit uses of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) particularly in social media. To conduct this research, I employ a gonzo social science approach: an immersive, investigative method that involves infiltrating and measuring underground forums and marketplaces for insights.
Prior to spending my time in the shady corners of the Internet, I worked in a variety of topics within security: vulnerability reproduction, deep learning for binary analyses, anonymous communications, moving target defenses, usable security, and computer security from legal and organizational perspectives. I am a recipient of the Cylab Presidential Fellowship (2022-2023), and the IEEE S&P Distinguished Paper Award (2018).
I obtained my Bachelor of Science from The Pennsylvania State University as a Schreyer Scholar and a member of The Presidential Leadership Academy. I completed my honors thesis under the supervision of Prof. Peng Liu and Prof. Dinghao Wu as a member of the Penn State Cyber Security Lab. In 2023, I was an intern at Microsoft Research’s Plural Technology Collaboratory, mentored by Glen Weyl and Madeleine Daepp.
I am also the co-founder of Redoux, a fragrance brand born in NY. We have received the inaugural Glossier Grant in 2021, 2x Architectural Digest Cleverest Awards (2022, 2023), and an Essence Best in Beauty Award 2024.
CV
Contact
cuevas [at] cmu [dot] edu
News
06-10-25 I will be joining Princeton CITP as a postdoctoral fellow, starting Sept. 1st.
With Madeleine Daepp, Robert Osazuwa Ness, and Joyojeet Pal
We characterize the use of Gen AI to manipulate public opinion through fieldwork in two countries characterized by their abundance of computational propaganda.
With Manoel Horta-Ribeiro and Nicolas Christin
(Under Submission)
We measure sales of social media accounts and investigate their uses after they are sold. We find that many accounts are used for potentially illicit ends, such as political propaganda or financial scams. We then develop a technique to identify similar accounts in the wild.
With Saloni Dash, Madeleine Daepp, Bharat Nayak, and Dan Vann
(Under Submission)
We develop an AI red teaming approach to automatically generate adversarial prompts across languages and cultures. Our goal is to develop techniqes to mitigate disinformation that scale globally and realistically reflect how adversaries (mis)use models.
With Taro Tsuchiya, Tina Marjanov, Haoxiang Yu and Nicolas Christin
We collect a large dataset of Telegram bots using snowball sampling as well as other public sources. We then interact with the bots to obtain additional information about their uses. Our goal is to characterize the uses of Telegram bots, ranging from the benign to the malicious.
With Nicolas Christin
We document and characterize the emerging and evolving use cases of Generative AI models by exploring how people in underground communities use, monetize, and distribute Gen AI tools and models.
ACM CSCW 2025
USENIX Security 2024
ACM WWW 2024