Jonathan Kozlik, NJIT Student Entrepreneur, Makes the Most of Scholarship

Scholarships help many students get to college, but for Jonathan Kozlik a scholarship to New Jersey Institute of Technology led him to a technical conference in Florida, where he found inspiration to form his own company testing the security of other people's artificial intelligence applications.

Kozlik, a junior from Aberdeen double-majoring in computer science and applied mathematics, received the National Science Foundation S-STEM scholarship for students with demonstrated financial need. He is entrepreneurial-minded and already ran another startup company, but his current operation - temporarily called Trainsafe - is unique and starting to gain traction.

In high school, Kozlik had friends who attended NJIT. "A lot of them are doing very well for themselves now. One of them works for L'Oreal after graduating as a chemical engineer, and they highly recommended it," he said. Cost was the other major factor: "The scholarship has done a lot for me. … I don't come from a rich family. I'm first generation," Kozlik said. "My mom's from Argentina. She came to the country by herself. She taught herself the language. She worked her whole life. And I grew up with her saying, 'You need an education.' She always wanted me to not have to work the same way that she did."

Kozlik will be included at NJIT Celebration this fall, an annual event featuring star alumni and exceptional current students, in his case because of the opportunities created from the scholarship he received.

Kozlik joined the Entrepreneurs Society, Rocketry Club and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. But he's most enthusiastic about the S-STEM scholarship perk of attending academic and industry events. That's what brought him and others to Daytona Beach last spring, accompanied by data science department chairman Prof. James Geller, to attend the 38th annual meeting of the prominent Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society.

"One of the most interesting talks that I saw was actually about jailbreaking LLMs," Kozlik said, referring to the technical work of forcing a large language model such as ChatGPT to follow your own rules instead of the original developer's. "To me it's just super interesting, because these things are going to be the foundation for everything. … I thought it was really interesting that someone was able to take the inner functionings of AI, something that's very abstracted, and show the potential flaws inside of it. And that led me down this path, which is where I am now with my new startup."

That's at the intersection of businesses and cybersecurity. After seeing inside flaws exposed by presenters at the Florida conference, Kozlik and friends realized they could build an application - and a startup company around it - to find and fix security problems on your behalf, including those caused by AI-developed code. AI code can be vulnerable because human developers trust it too much, he noted.

"What we started doing is building autonomous AI agents that can actively go through your code base and actually attack your website, servers, databases, all these things. And obviously this is with full permission from the people that we're doing it with. You can have AI do it autonomously. You can do it at scale, so you can also have the developers work alongside it. But we've created this really cool architecture where it goes over all the attack vectors in parallel. And what it does is it collects a giant feed of all of the security vulnerabilities it's found, and then it passes it into the defensive AI model, where it goes to your code base, or it works with your security team, and actually helps you implement fixes."

"We realized that in order to actually get this data, or in order to actually have a proof of concept to show that our data is working, we need to build that developer tool. And then we realized that we're addressing a problem in and of itself."

Reflecting on what he's accomplished in just three years, "NJIT is an extremely good environment for working on things yourself, becoming your own person, and that's something I truly believe in. No matter where you are, no one's going to hold your hand. Maybe it's on me for not reaching out to the resources. But the way I see it is, I want to build the fundamentals," Kozlik added.

"The reason I chose computer science is because it's not just for a good job. Computer science is a way to put ideas that you have into the world. It's a way to take this crazy vision that you have and materialize it, the same way an engineer wants to build something amazing like a jet pack."

"Jon has been supported by the Center for Student Entrepreneurship," said Martin Tuchman School of Management Prof. Kathy Naasz, who directs the center. "When he attends our open entrepreneurship hours, he inspires other students with his success story of having sold his first startup and he continues to build more."