In a study accepted for the 2026 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Georgia Tech researchers interviewed 20 military sailors about their cybersecurity experiences, training, and responses to hypothetical scenarios. Their findings point to a gap between how mariners are trained to handle emergencies and how cyberattacks can compromise the systems they depend on. 

The study found several gaps in how crews prepare for cyber threats:

• Training often misses the mark. Thirteen participants said that standard cybersecurity training was largely irrelevant to their shipboard duties, and 14 reported receiving no mission-specific cybersecurity training.
• Operational technology is often overlooked. Eighteen participants said their training did not distinguish between traditional information technology and operational technology, such as navigation and propulsion systems.
• Obvious failures are easier to recognize. Eighteen participants said they would primarily look for visible signs of operational problems when identifying a potential cyberattack.
• Cybersecurity is often a low priority. Seventeen participants described their cybersecurity training as absent, low quality, or a low priority.

These gaps matter because cyberattacks can compromise a system without causing it to stop working. For example, an attacker could manipulate navigation data, leaving a crew to make decisions based on false information.

“I’d assume it was anything but cyber at first. It would probably take me quite some time to get to that conclusion,” one participant told the researchers.

The team examined three hypothetical scenarios: GPS spoofing, loss of propulsion control in a high-traffic area, and failure of electronic navigation systems in a congested channel at night.

In each scenario, mariners would first focus on keeping the vessel safe, using established procedures to stabilize the ship and troubleshoot its systems. While this response is essential during an emergency, it could delay recognition of an attack if crews do not consider that the system or its data may have been compromised.

For example, a ship navigating a narrow channel depends on accurate location information, but what happens when its navigation systems appear to work normally while a hacker manipulates that data?

An attacker could use GPS spoofing to falsify a vessel’s reported position. If the false position is close enough to the ship’s actual location, a mariner might not notice anything wrong. The vessel could gradually head toward shallow water or another obstacle without triggering an obvious error or alarm.

“By the time the mariner realizes something is wrong, the ship’s size and limited maneuverability could make it too late to avoid a grounding or collision,” said Anna Raymaker, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who studies maritime security.

The scenario illustrates a central challenge in maritime cybersecurity: An equipment failure may be easy to recognize, but a cyberattack that provides false information can be much harder to detect.

Batten the Hatches: Cybersecurity with Military Mariners was written by master’s student Ryan Von Brock, Raymaker, Research Scientist Animesh Chhotaray, Associate Professors Frank Li and Saman Zonouz, and Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Raheem Beyah.

The research was conducted in Georgia Tech’s Cyber-Physical Security Lab, a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

Photos by Terence Rushin/College of Computing

This summer, M.S. student Joey Cuthbert contributed to this mission through an internship at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Upon returning to campus, Cuthbert reflected on his internship and what he learned working alongside researchers in government and the defense community.  

Student: Joey Cuthbert

Research Interests: Machine learning (ML), model-based systems engineering

Degree Program: M.S. in Computational Science and Engineering, home unit in H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

2026 Internship: Sensors Directorate Internship Program with Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), Beavercreek, Ohio

What about AFRL interested you in applying for and accepting an internship there?

The Sensors Directorate Internship Program (SDIP) provided a unique opportunity to work alongside mentors from AFRL and NASIC on a defense-related research project over a 14-week internship. This aligned with my desire to work on applied ML research in the defense sector and allowed me to better understand the ins and outs of government and government-contracting work. The program provided competitive pay and housing throughout the program, which was a huge plus for me.

How well did your coursework and experience at Georgia Tech prepare you for your AFRL internship?

My experience and coursework at Georgia Tech helped me a great deal this summer. I believe my understanding of ML has greatly improved over the past two semesters, which helped me complete my internship project. All of my experiments ran on high-performance computing (HPC) systems, and I felt I had a head start since I completed an HPC class last spring. 

What did you work on while interning at AFRL?

I worked on an image-classification robustness project for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. I built a robustness benchmark by testing a model against nine types of noise, and used it to show how we can effectively increase robustness by inducing shape-bias in the model during training. 

Do you have a favorite memory or remarkable achievement from your internship?

During the summer, we went on a tour of nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where we visited the sensors directorate buildings and checked out some of their labs. I also received the best poster presentation award among approximately 40 interns. 

Overall, how helpful was this internship toward your studies at Georgia Tech and career as an aspiring researcher?

This program provided great strides toward my research career goals. My coursework has provided a great foundation in ML, and I was able to apply this knowledge to a project. The internship offered me lots of autonomy, as well as time to explore different paths to find results. 

From what you learned on your internship, how important are government agencies in progressing research and scientific discovery?

I believe government agencies are massively valuable in advancing research and scientific discovery, especially within the defense sector. All work at AFRL has the goal of giving warfighters the greatest advantage possible. This often entails looking 10 to 20 years into the future of science and technology and trying to get there as fast as possible. 

The GTRI field office, which includes a new large secure classified workspace, will house GTRI engineers and scientists working shoulder to shoulder with U.S. Space Force teams. The Colorado Springs Field Office currently has forty GTRI personnel on staff.  The arrangement reflects a growing conviction inside the defense community that the pace of modern threats requires a closer, faster collaboration between researchers and the warfighters they support. 
 

“We won’t have to go through layers of translation because the government people with technology needs will be sitting next to the GTRI engineers offering solutions. It makes for a very close interaction that we expect to continue for many years to come” said John Bunnell, GTRI’s Director of Space Program Development.

Read the entire article on the GTRI News page

Despite decades of research, the chaotic nature of turbulence makes it difficult to predict and control. This challenge impedes more than smoother air travel. Solving the turbulence problem could lead to advances in areas ranging from sustainable energy to training a smarter workforce for the era of artificial intelligence (AI).

To advance understanding of turbulence, the National Science Foundation is establishing a new, $30 million Science and Technology Center (STC) at Michigan State University. Georgia Tech is among eight universities supporting the center.

Assistant Professor Qi Tang will join the STC for Transformative Explorations in Multi-Physics and Engineering of Scientific Turbulence (TEMPEST). TEMPEST, launching on Sept. 1, aims to build trustworthy, predictive models of real-world turbulence. 

Tang will lead TEMPEST’s modeling and scientific machine learning (ML) efforts. NSF will fund Tang and Georgia Tech with over $1 million from the center’s five-year, $30 million award.

By understanding and predicting turbulence, TEMPEST can unlock new applications, with a focus on fusion energy and national security. The center will also generate long-term research projects with applications in air and space flight, manufacturing, chemistry, and broaden science education and AI fluency.

“Turbulence has resisted prediction for a century,” said Tang, a faculty member in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).

“STC TEMPEST aims to develop a unified, predictive science that advances fusion energy, improves hypersonic technologies, and deepens our understanding of how stars created the elements that make up our world and ourselves. For everyday people, the center points toward abundant clean energy and faster, more efficient flight."

Turbulence is the motion of a fluid characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and speed. Turbulent flows can occur across all scales, from interactions between subatomic particles to astrophysical scales, including supernovas, black holes, and cosmic rays. 

While turbulent flows are common and occur naturally, scientists still do not fully understand them. Small changes in a turbulent flow can produce dramatically different outcomes. Combined with the countless interactions across multiple scales of time and space, this makes turbulence extraordinarily difficult to predict.

“Rather than studying individual pieces of this enormously complex problem in isolation, we are bringing together theory, experimentation, computation and artificial intelligence to develop a deeper understanding of turbulence across scales,” said Michael Murillo, an MSU professor and the director of TEMPEST. 

“Our goal is not simply to understand turbulence better, but to make it predictable and controllable in ways that will enable new technologies and scientific discoveries.”

The NSF TEMPEST award supports students and researchers at Michigan State University, Auburn University, Baylor University, Georgia Tech, San José State University, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, University of Rochester, and Yale University to combine theory, computation, AI techniques, and experimentation to build trustworthy predictive models of real-world turbulence for high-consequence applications.

Additional partners include Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pacific Fusion, and General Atomics.

Together, TEMPEST researchers will build more accurate and reliable physics-grounded models. The center will test new ideas against real-world observations, then use those results to refine the models. 

Tang contributes expertise in ML, scientific computing, and plasma physics to STC TEMPEST. 

Earlier this year, Tang received an Early Career Research award from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. He is using the award to build ML and data science tools that help scientists analyze massive datasets from fusion experiments and simulations.

This interdisciplinary approach is intended to move science from understanding why turbulence behaves as it does to predicting how it will behave. Through prediction and simulation, scientists could eventually engineer solutions to control turbulence in real-world scenarios.

The center will make its data and software broadly available and engage the public through museum exhibitions, immersive media, and educational programs that are expected to reach more than 10,000 K-12 students annually. TEMPEST will also help train an AI-fluent scientific workforce prepared to tackle complex problems across disciplines.

“One reason I am excited to work in TEMPEST is because it aligns perfectly with our School of CSE mission. As a discipline, CSE complements theory and experimentation as a mode of scientific discovery,” Tang said. 

“We build computational models to simulate scientific and engineering concepts, like turbulence in this case, so that we can test theories that are too difficult, expensive, or risky for physical experiments.”

From fighter jets to medical devices, today’s most advanced machines depend on parts as intricate as their missions. These components aren’t just geometrically complex — they’re made from specialized metals engineered to withstand extreme heat, friction, and wear. But that strength comes with a challenge. How do you shape metals tough enough to survive the heat of a jet engine? 

The event marks the culmination of the semester-long I2P course, where undergraduate students develop functional prototypes aimed at solving real-world problems. Prototypes this semester include a smart military drone, a gentler device for cervical cancer screening, a rotating espresso station, tools to keep AI safe, compact data centers, systems that simulate cyberattacks to help companies strengthen their defenses, and many more. 

The showcase is free and open to students, faculty, staff, and members of the local community. 

Winning teams will receive prizes and a “golden ticket” into CREATE-X’s Startup Launch, a summer accelerator that provides optional seed funding, accounting and legal service credits, mentorship, and more to help students turn their prototypes into viable startups.

This is a free event, and refreshments will be provided. Register for the Fall 2025 I2P Showcase today!

Georgia Tech roboticists are attempting to identify the most stressful periods that human teleoperators experience while performing tasks remotely. A novel study provides new insights into determining when a teleoperator needs to operate at a high level of focus and which parts of the task can be delegated to robot automation.

School of Interactive Computing Associate Professor Matthew Gombolay calls it the “sweet spot” of human ingenuity and robotic precision. Gombolay and students from his CORE Robotics Labconducted a novel study that measures stress and workload on human teleoperators.

Gombolay said it can inform military officials on how to strategically implement task automation and maximize human teleoperator performance.

Humans continue to hand over more tasks to robots to perform, but Gombolay said that some functions will still require human input and oversight for the foreseeable future.

Specific applications, such as space exploration, commercial and military aviation, disaster relief, and search and rescue, pose substantial safety concerns. Astronauts stationed on the International Space Station, for example, manually control robots that bring in supplies, move cargo, and make structural repairs.

“It’s brutal from a psychological perspective,” Gombolay said.

The question often asked about automating a task in these fields is, at what point can a robot be trusted more than a human?

A recent paper by Gombolay and his current and former students — Sam Yi Ting, Erin Hedlund-Botti, and Manisha Natarajan — sheds new light on the debate. The paper was published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and will be presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Atlanta.

The NASA-funded study can identify which aspects of tedious, time-consuming tasks can be automated and which require human supervision. If roboticists can pinpoint the elements of a task that cause the least stress, they can automate these components and enable humans to oversee the more challenging aspects.

“If we’re talking about repetitive tasks, robots do better with that, so if you can automate it, you should,” said Ting, a former grad student and lead author of the paper. “I don’t think humans enjoy doing repetitive tasks. We can move toward a better future with automation.”

Military officials, for example, could measure the stress of remote drone pilots and know which times during a pilot’s shift require the highest level of attention.

“We can get a sense of how stressed you are and create models of how divided your attention is and the performance rate of the tasks you’re doing,” Gombolay said.

“It can be a low-stress or high-stress situation depending on the stakes and what’s going on with you personally. Are you well-caffeinated? Well-rested? Is there stress from home you’re bringing with you to the workplace? The goal is to predict how good your task performance will be. If it indicates it might be poor, we may need to outsource work to other people or create a safe space for the operator to destress.”

The Stress Test

For their study, the researchers cut a small river-shaped path into a medium-density fiberboard. The exercise required the 24 participants to use a remote robotic arm to navigate through the path from one end to the other without touching the edges.

The experiment grew more challenging as new stress conditions and workload requirements were introduced. The changing conditions required the test participants to multitask to complete the assignment.

Gombolay said the study supports the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which states that moderate levels of stress increase human performance.

The experiment showed that operators felt overwhelmed and performed poorly when multitasking was introduced. Too much stress led to poor performance, but a moderate amount of stress induced more engagement and enhanced teleoperator focus. 

Ting said finding that ideal stress zone can lead to a higher performance rating. 

“You would think the more stressed you are, the more your performance decreases,” Ting said. “Most people didn’t react that way. As stress increased, performance increased, but when you increased workload and gave them more to do, that’s when you started seeing deteriorating performance.”

Gombolay said no stress can be just as detrimental as too much stress. Performing a task without stress tends to cause teleoperators to become disinterested, especially if it is repetitive and time-consuming.

“No stress led to complacency,” Gombolay said. “They weren’t as engaged in completing the task.

“If your excitement is too low, you get so bored you can’t muster the cognitive energy to reason about robot operation problems.”

The Human Factor

Roboticists have made significant leaps in recent years to remove teleoperators from the equation. Still, Gombolay said it’s too early to tell whether robots can be trusted with any task that a human can perform.

“We’re a long way from full autonomy,” he said. “There’s a lot that robots still can’t do without a human operator. Search and rescue operations, if a building collapses, we don’t have much training data for robots to go through rubble by themselves to rescue people. There are ethical needs for humans to be able to supervise or take direct control of robots.”

The project was part of Computer Science Junior Design Capstone Expo, where students collaborate in teams to build functional software solutions for real-world clients. For team members Jonathan Collins, Joel Cave, Srithan Nalluri, Mark Podrazhansky, and Caden Virant, that client was the U.S. Army. School of Computing Instruction Lecturer Aibek Musaev led their Junior Design section.

“The Army spends a significant amount of time maintaining, documenting, and repairing equipment that allows them to complete their mission,” said Collins, a U.S. Army veteran. “Our system essentially took the current maintenance process and converted it from an entirely paper-based process to a completely digital one.”

The team built a streamlined web application utilizing a set of modern tools that enhance data management, create a user-friendly interface, and ensure seamless operations. The new system improves accountability and visibility across Army maintenance operations by digitizing the intake and tracking processes. It eliminates the risk of lost paperwork and makes it easier for personnel to stay updated on equipment status and repair needs.

2nd Lt. Noah Parsons, the Army’s point of contact for the project, was impressed with both the product and the team’s professionalism.

“Georgia Tech students have completed the intake system to perfection,” Parsons said. “They performed exceptionally and professionally. I cannot stress how great of a job they have done for their class and for the Army as well. Our company intends to start using the intake system as early as next month.”

For Collins, who served four years in the Army before enrolling at Georgia Tech, the experience was meaningful.

“A large part of my role in the Army involved the very maintenance processes we’ve been working to improve,” he said. “I can’t even count how many hours my coworkers and I spent with the current system. Now, being able to use this new chapter of my life to make meaningful improvements feels incredibly rewarding.”

Collins also took the lead in communicating with the military client, helping the team navigate strict requirements and non-negotiable specifications.

With this system, the Army decided what they wanted, and the team was tasked with delivering exactly that with no variation.

The project taught the team critical lessons about ownership, communication, and collaboration under pressure.

“Communication with the client is the absolute most important thing,” Collins said. “You could have the best programmers in the world, but it won’t matter if you can’t deliver the product the client wants. Meeting often and getting consistent feedback was key.”

The Army plans to begin using the system as early as June, bringing the students’ work full circle and marking a meaningful contribution to real-world military operations.

Wang is a recipient of the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). The award recognizes Wang for his lifelong work on democratizing human-centered AI.

“Throughout my Ph.D. and industry internships, I observed a gap in existing research: there is a strong need for practical tools for applying human-centered approaches when designing AI systems,” said Wang, now a safety researcher at OpenAI.

“My work not only helps people understand AI and guide its behavior but also provides user-friendly tools that fit into existing workflows.”

[Related: Georgia Tech College of Computing Swarms to Yokohama, Japan, for CHI 2025]

Wang’s dissertation presented techniques in visual explanation and interactive guidance to align AI models with user knowledge and values. The work culminated from years of research, fellowship support, and internships.

Wang’s most influential projects formed the core of his dissertation. These included:

• CNN Explainer: an open-source tool developed for deep-learning beginners. Since its release in July 2020, more than 436,000 global visitors have used the tool.
• DiffusionDB: a first-of-its-kind large-scale dataset that lays a foundation to help people better understand generative AI. This work could lead to new research in detecting deepfakes and designing human-AI interaction tools to help people more easily use these models.
• GAM Changer: an interface that empowers users in healthcare, finance, or other domains to edit ML models to include knowledge and values specific to their domain, which improves reliability.
• GAM Coach: an interactive ML tool that could help people who have been rejected for a loan by automatically letting an applicant know what is needed for them to receive loan approval.
• Farsight: a tool that alerts developers when they write prompts in large language models that could be harmful and misused.  

“I feel extremely honored and lucky to receive this award, and I am deeply grateful to many who have supported me along the way, including Polo, mentors, collaborators, and friends,” said Wang, who was advised by School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Professor Polo Chau.

“This recognition also inspired me to continue striving to design and develop easy-to-use tools that help everyone to easily interact with AI systems.”

Like Wang, Chau advised Georgia Tech alumnus Fred Hohman (Ph.D. CSE 2020). Hohman won the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2022.

Chau’s group synthesizes machine learning (ML) and visualization techniques into scalable, interactive, and trustworthy tools. These tools increase understanding and interaction with large-scale data and ML models. 

Chau is the associate director of corporate relations for the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech. Wang called the School of CSE his home unit while a student in the ML program under Chau.

Wang is one of five recipients of this year’s award to be presented at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025). The conference occurs April 25-May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. 

SIGCHI is the world’s largest association of human-computer interaction professionals and practitioners. The group sponsors or co-sponsors 26 conferences, including CHI.

Wang’s outstanding dissertation award is the latest recognition of a career decorated with achievement.

Months after graduating from Georgia Tech, Forbes named Wang to its 30 Under 30 in Science for 2025 for his dissertation. Wang was one of 15 Yellow Jackets included in nine different 30 Under 30 lists and the only Georgia Tech-affiliated individual on the 30 Under 30 in Science list.

While a Georgia Tech student, Wang earned recognition from big names in business and technology. He received the Apple Scholars in AI/ML Ph.D. Fellowship in 2023 and was in the 2022 cohort of the J.P. Morgan AI Ph.D. Fellowships Program.

Along with the CHI award, Wang’s dissertation earned him awards this year at banquets across campus. The Georgia Tech chapter of Sigma Xi presented Wang with the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award. He also received the College of Computing’s Outstanding Dissertation Award.

“Georgia Tech attracts many great minds, and I’m glad that some, like Jay, chose to join our group,” Chau said. “It has been a joy to work alongside them and witness the many wonderful things they have accomplished, and with many more to come in their careers.”