PhD Researcher · University of North Texas

Ali
Safari.

Information Systems researcher. PhD student at the University of North Texas, working on AI governance, trust, and technology adoption.

Agentic AI Trust in AI Cybersecurity AI Governance Privacy Human-AI Collaboration
Ali Safari
5
Papers
10+
Yrs tech
258
Field Notes
About

I study how humans and organizations can trust AI systems, particularly in high-stakes domains like cybersecurity and governance.

As a PhD student at UNT, I work with Dr. Dan J. Kim on trust and security, with Dr. Justin Ku on open-set recognition, with Dr. Anna Sidorova on agentic AI delegation, and with Dr. Hoon Choi on social media analytics.

My path to academia was not typical. I spent over a decade building technology businesses, including Rasa, a digital marketing platform I founded that became one of the largest in the Middle East. Since starting my PhD, I built RaSEC, a free security platform for students and researchers.

I led 100+ projects, built teams, and taught digital marketing to MBA students. This experience shapes how I think about research: ideas that actually work in organizations.

10+
Years in tech industry
100+
Projects led
5
Published papers
258
Field Notes entries
Research areas
01

Agentic AI & Human-AI Delegation

How humans and AI systems allocate task authority to one another. Bidirectional delegation, authority calibration, and maintaining appropriate control in collaborative tasks.

02

Trust in Intelligent Systems

When should humans trust AI? How does confidence feedback shape trust calibration in cybersecurity and decision-making?

03

Cybersecurity & Open-Set Threat Detection

Teaching AI to recognize attack patterns it has never seen, using Extreme Value Machines for novel threat detection in IoT and IS security.

04

AI Governance & Accountability

How organizations govern AI systems. Who is accountable when things fail, and how governance structures need to adapt.

05

Privacy & Information Disclosure

Why people disclose data in some contexts but not others. The privacy calculus, context-dependence, and the boundary between perceived benefit and risk.

06

IS Theory & Technology Adoption

How organizations adopt and integrate new information systems. Grounded in classic IS theory with attention to real-world adoption patterns.

Publications
2025
Enhancing IoT Security and Information Systems Resilience: An Extreme Value Machine Approach
A. Safari, D.J. Kim
International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), 2025
View presentation →
ICIS 2025
2025
Calibrating Human Trust in AI Cybersecurity Alerts: The Impact of Real-Time Confidence Feedback
A. Safari, G. Dhillon
Annual Security Conference, 2025
2025
Autonomous Constitutional AI Governance: A Dual-Agent System for Real-Time Ethical Compliance
A. Safari
International Conference on Entrepreneurship for Sustainability & Impact, 2025
2025
Social Vulnerability and Disability Prevalence: A Multivariate Analysis Across U.S. Counties
A. Safari, F. Asgari, R. Saeidi
Decision Sciences Institute (DSI), 2025
2025
Sentiment Analysis of Airbnb Reviews: Exploring Their Impact on Acceptance Rates and Pricing
A. Safari
arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.14053, 2025
arXiv ↗
All publications on Google Scholar ↗
From the blog

Field Notes.

All 258 entries →
Comps & Reflections
The IT Artifact Is Not Optional
7 min
AI & Agentic Systems
AI Agents Create a Principal-Agent Problem at Machine Speed
6 min
IS Theory
Bought a $2M Platform, Nobody Learned a Thing
6 min
IS Research Methods
Action Research in IS: When the Researcher Is Also the Intervener
7 min
IT Governance & Strategy
5G Is Not About Faster Phones. Here Is What Enterprises Actually Care About.
7 min

The AI conversation has moved beyond models and tools.

Integration matters more than adoption. Decision quality over prediction accuracy. Security and privacy at the center, not the edges. And collective intelligence: not humans versus AI, but organizations working with AI to make better decisions together.

Contact

Open to research collaboration, conference discussions, and conversations about AI governance and IS theory.

Email alisafari@my.unt.edu LinkedIn Connect Google Scholar Publications Field Notes. 258 research entries