My Project and My Amazing Mentor!

Hello everyone! Welcome to my third blog post of the summer. This is Anish Kosaraju and today, I will be talking about my project, how the 3M summer mentorship has helped me so far, and a bit about the challenge.

It’s estimated that billions of dollars are lost to account takeovers each year, with California being one of the most affected states.

Multi-Factor Authentication is a current method to prevent account takeovers and involves the user providing multiple forms of identification to prove their identity. However, many users don’t use Multi-Factor Authentication due to inconvenience or cost.

I decided to combine my love for Artificial Intelligence with a problem I was passionate about solving by creating a machine learning-based solution that can prevent account takeovers by predicting whether a login attempt is legitimate or an attack. One of the biggest challenges that I faced was finding login data set to train and test my model since many organizations are not willing to publish these data sets to the public and this is where 3M comes in.

At the start of the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, 3M provided each finalist with a 3M scientist as a mentor to help bring our project ideas to life. One of my favorite parts of the challenge is that I meet with my mentor, Dr. Döne, every week to discuss progress; she has been incredibly helpful. She is currently in the process of acquiring a login data set from 3M. 

I would like to thank 3M and my mentor for all the help so far and I don’t think I could have gotten this far without them. I look forward to continuing my mentorship and advancing my project further and I hope to see you again for the next blog post. Bye!