Ian Drosos
Resume CV

Ian Drosos

Security & AI Designer / Developer

I lead UX design engineering at Trent AI, a security startup making code and organizations safer. I am a mixed-methods HCI researcher designing tools for developers, data scientists, content creators, and learners. Publishing at venues such as CHI (opens in a new tab), DIS (opens in a new tab), and VLHCC (opens in a new tab).

Featured Work

CHIWORK 2025

Promptly Dynamic Prompt Middleware

2nd Place Hackathon

Prompting generative AI effectively is challenging for users, particularly in expressing context for comprehension tasks. We address this challenge by creating Dynamic Prompt Middleware, which generates UI elements for prompt refinement based on the user's specific prompt. Users found it afforded more control, lowered barriers to providing context, encouraged task exploration and reflection, and improved the user experience of generative AI workflows. Promptly won 2nd place at Microsoft's 2024 Hackathon as part of the 'Everyday AI' Executive Challenge.

CHI 2020

Wrex

Best Paper Award

Created a unified programming-by-example interaction for synthesizing readable code within Jupyter notebooks. Data scientists found it made them significantly more effective at data wrangling.

VLHCC 2023

FxD

Best Paper Honorable Mention

Led HCI research on a novel functional debugger for dysfunctional spreadsheets which provided structured information for improved systematic formula debugging. Released as part of Excel Labs.

Now

Trent AI

Leading UX design engineering for agentic AI-based software and AI security to make code and organizations safer.

  • Security
  • AI UX Design

Case study Coming soon

2022–2025

Microsoft Research & Product Impact

Selected contributions beyond AI/CS research:

  • Promptly design research shared with 18+ product teams for improving AI prompting experiences
  • 2024: 2nd place 'Everyday AI' Executive Challenge by Peter Lee (MSR President)
  • 2023: 2nd place 'Change the Game' Challenge by Phil Spencer (Xbox CEO)
  • Presenter at MLADS Conference on LLM designs for Excel
  • Design work for LLM co-audit in Excel and beyond

Education & Experience

Currently leading UX design engineering at Trent AI (opens in a new tab) (2025–present). Previously HCI researcher at Microsoft Research (opens in a new tab) (2022–2025) and full-stack software engineer at Verizon. PhD in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego, MS in Computer Science from NC State.

Education

  1. 2017–2022 PhD Cognitive Science UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA
  2. 2015–2017 MS Computer Science NC State University, Raleigh, NC
  3. 2007–2011 BS Computer Science Southern Polytechnic State University, Marietta, GA

Experience

  1. 2025–present Member of Technical Staff Trent AI
  2. 2022–2025 Researcher Microsoft Research
  3. 2017–2022 Researcher The Design Lab, UCSD
  4. 2018–2022 Instructor & Teaching Assistant UC San Diego
  5. 2021, 2018 Research Intern Autodesk Research, Microsoft
  6. 2011–2015 Software Engineer Verizon

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