Policymakers, health system executives, community leaders and others working to address this challenge now have help from Rural Evaluation and Analytics for Community Health (REACH GA), an advanced decision-support platform that offers a comprehensive view of healthcare use in rural Georgia. In addition to updated information on rural health issues, the platform provides computer-based tools to guide allocation of healthcare resources and explore the potential impact of changes to rural health services. 

“The REACH GA platform provides up-to-date, actionable information to help leaders understand the big picture of healthcare in rural Georgia,” said Jon Duke, M.D., a principal research scientist in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the project’s principal investigator. “Beyond more accurate data, the platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) and other computer-driven tools to support improved decision-making.”

Of Georgia’s 159 counties, 126 are considered rural. Approximately 24 percent of the state’s 11.3 million residents live in these rural areas.

Read the full article on the GTRI news page

Clean technology company Gaia Agricultural Technology is working to help Los Angeles address some of those challenges through Gaia Box, its patented infrastructure system designed to generate and store energy while supporting plant growth.

Using a closed-loop water system, Gaia Box integrates energy infrastructure with plant-growing space. It can work alongside solar, utility power, or battery storage, addressing multiple energy needs while contributing to a more attractive streetscape.

Gaia's first public Gaia Box installation is operating near the Los Angeles Department of Transportation's Pico Station, close to Crypto.com Arena. Through a pilot partnership with the Los Angeles South Park Business Improvement District, the system is supporting decorative lighting along Flower Street while being tested in a high-traffic urban environment. The year-long pilot could include up to 10 Gaia Box units.

Solving Problems With Clean Technology

For founder and CEO James Highsmith, Gaia Box was never intended to solve an infrastructure problem alone.

"We come from the community," Highsmith said. "We weren't trying to build a product just to sell. We were trying to solve problems that we were experiencing ourselves."

The idea grew from a challenge Highsmith and co-founder and inventor DeMarco Millard encountered firsthand. When colder temperatures required crops they were growing outdoors to be moved indoors, the resulting increase in energy costs raised a larger question: Could they create one solution that addressed both energy use and food production?

Building it came with challenges. As a hardware startup operating across agriculture, clean energy, and infrastructure, Gaia did not fit neatly into an established category. Highsmith recalls years of skepticism from people who struggled to understand the concept.

"We went through years of being told we didn't know what we were doing," Highsmith said. Those experiences forced Gaia to refine both its approach and how it communicated its value. That evolution became an important part of the company's work with the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech.

With coaching from ATDC Sustainability Catalyst Jennifer Singh, Highsmith said Gaia learned to explain the company from a systems perspective, connecting energy, agriculture, infrastructure, and community needs, while also communicating its impact on a human level.

"ATDC taught us the importance of communicating with story and not losing the plot," Highsmith said.

Through ATDC's coaching, Feedback Friday, Entrepreneurs Night, mentorship, and strategic guidance, Gaia also gained relationships and feedback that helped prepare the company for conversations with customers and partners. Highsmith credits Singh, Lisa Bailey, and other advisors with contributing to the company's growth.

Partners in Sustainability

In Los Angeles, Nolan Marshall III, CEO of the Los Angeles South Park Business Improvement District, became a key pilot partner, allowing Gaia to demonstrate Gaia Box against real infrastructure needs. Another step toward commercialization came through Gaia's partnership with the Alabama Mobility and Power Center (AMP) at The University of Alabama. Working with AMP Research Director Mike Malley and his team, Gaia gained support related to battery-backed infrastructure, customer energy requirements, battery sizing, safety considerations, installation, and maintenance. AMP also provides engineering expertise that strengthens Gaia's ability to prepare for larger projects.

The company's vision extends beyond the technology. Gaia plans to incorporate workforce development into future rollouts, creating opportunities for people to gain experience and certifications in plumbing, electrical work, and construction — trades directly connected to building and maintaining Gaia Box units. "These systems should create value for the people who live around them, not just the people who purchase them," Highsmith said.

With its first Los Angeles Gaia Box operating and additional configurations planned, Gaia is exploring opportunities in Georgia, Maryland, and other markets as it moves toward broader commercialization. For a company that spent years being told its idea did not make sense, the Los Angeles rollout is an opportunity to test how resilient infrastructure can address multiple challenges while creating value for the communities it serves.

However, a new paper by a Georgia Tech-led research team suggests that the requirements can disproportionately burden family farms and other small food producers due to a lack of technological infrastructure, resources, or compliance expertise.

The rule is mandated by Section 204(d) of the Food Safety Modernization Act, which Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed into law in 2011. Intended to help the FDA quickly identify the source of contamination, the rule requires producers or distributors with more than $25,000 in annual produce sales to comply or face significant fines. 

Earlier this year, the FDA extended its compliance deadline to July 2028. One reason for the extension may be the volume of feedback from stakeholders affected by the rule. The FDA received more than 1,200 comments during an open forum, with feedback from stakeholders ranging from major distributors to small farmers. 

“Many small farmers commented on how they may not have the devices needed to input this data,” said Soonho Kwon, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing (SIC) and lead author of the paper. “Does this mean they have to purchase it themselves? Do they need to become educated on how to use computing systems?”

Kwon is a member of the Equity and Sustainability in Computing Lab, which is led by SIC professor and chair Shaowen Bardzell.

Many small farms also said they can’t afford to hire someone to track the data.

One small farmer said the amount of data tracking required by the rule is overwhelming. Some of the required data include:

• location and name of the field where food was harvested
• date of harvest
• packing dates
• shipping dates

“Please do not force us to do technology stuff,” the commenter said. “It’s hard enough to keep up with the local demand as it is. We run a pretty low digital technology effort. It’s basically harvest fresh organically grown veggies and sell them to local people.”

Kwon said the intention of the Food Traceability Rule is admirable.

“Preventing foodborne illness is critical, and data- and technology-driven governance can be a powerful tool toward that goal,” he said. “But it’s equally important to think critically about who is supposed to be the default user of these systems, and who gets missed in the process. It’s undermining the people who are unable to comply.”

Other factors didn’t appear to be considered by the FDA, including the lack of technological infrastructure in rural America, where many foods are grown.

“Many parts of rural America have limited or unreliable internet access,” Kwon said. “If the FDA wants them to send this data, they must comply within 24 hours. Does that mean they have to stop their daily routine and drive to a city that has internet to send it? The rule is operating on the assumption that everyone is dealing with the same physical environment.”

Culture and religion also seem overlooked. Some commenters raised concerns that Amish farmers who avoid certain technologies for religious reasons would be pressured into digital record keeping.

Many major distributors and organizations expressed support for the Food Traceability Rule in the FDA’s forum. Catherine Wieczorek, a Ph.D. student in SIC and co-author on the paper, said these organizations don’t have the same tension points as smaller producers.

“Larger food producers have the operational capacity to do the type of work the rule requires,” Wieczorek said. “We find there’s a power imbalance when it comes to smaller food producers like a family farm. Change at that scale is difficult for smaller producers.”

Bardzell, who advises Kwon and Wieczorek, said the situation provides computing researchers an opportunity to create interventions that will benefit those with fewer resources.

“In a data age when we’re adding AI into our work processes and labor practices, we need to think about how this need creates unequal burdens on different stakeholders in our food system,” Bardzell said. “It’s a significant challenge for computing going forward.”

Kwon will present the paper on behalf of his collaborators next week at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) in Salt Lake City, Utah. Their research is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Georgia Tech researchers have developed a tool that can recover deleted conversations from AI assistants running on Android phones. The tool, called ORISA, can also rebuild the recovered information into a working AI session.

The findings show that deleting an AI conversation on a phone does not necessarily mean it removes every trace.

The research could give digital investigators a new way to recover information from phones. It also raises privacy concerns for people who use AI assistants that run locally on their devices.

Local AI assistants run directly on a phone rather than sending conversations to a cloud service. While the local assistant is running, information from conversations can remain in the phone’s working memory even after it is deleted.

ORISA searches this memory for pieces of deleted conversations.

In one experiment, researchers created a fictional AI assistant called “Project Note Keeper” using the ChatterUI Android app. They gave it 100 fictional facts about a project, then deleted the conversation.

ORISA recovered information from the deleted conversation and used it to create a new working session. When researchers asked the restored assistant to list the project notes it had been given, it returned 26 facts. The original session could access only 14 facts because the rest had fallen outside its active memory.

The experiment showed that researchers could recover information the AI had already stopped actively using.

“It can help establish what information someone shared with an AI assistant and what assistance they received,” said Ph.D. student Ken Xu, lead author of the study.

The researchers tested ORISA with 10 Android apps and three AI models. Across 60 test configurations, the tool recovered conversation information that remained in the phone’s memory.

The researchers say the information becomes harder to recover as the phone’s memory is overwritten by other activity.

The research was presented at the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The paper, titled Recovering and Rehosting Mobile Local LLM Conversations and Contexts via Memory Forensics, was authored by Ph.D. students Xu, David Oygenblik, Runze Zhang, and Mingxuan Yao; Research Scientist Muhammad Ibrahim; and Associate Professor Brendan Saltaformaggio. The work was done in Georgia Tech's Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory, a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

Students will work with faculty mentors from both institutions and complete advanced coursework and a capstone project focused on developing and applying technologies in healthcare. The master’s degree is offered through Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary Master of Science in Robotics program, which brings together faculty and expertise from six schools, including the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

According to Jaydev Desai, professor and Cardiovascular Biomedical Engineering Distinguished Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, the pathway will help future physicians develop the technical expertise to understand and apply emerging technologies as they shape patient care.

Read the full story on the Emory School of Medicine website.

Francis Halzen, principal investigator of the NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was honored by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his “decisive contributions to IceCube and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” 

“Francis proposed building a neutrino telescope in Antarctic ice, and along with his collaborators, he proved that it is possible to detect neutrinos in this challenging environment,” says Ignacio Taboada, professor in the School of Physics and former spokesperson for the IceCube Collaboration. “IceCube was a technological tour de force, and its success is now recognized by this Nobel Prize. The award energizes the nascent field of neutrino astronomy.”

A. Nepomuk Otte, professor in the School of Physics, describes the impact of IceCube’s results as “breathtaking.”

“What we are witnessing is the opening of an entirely new window into the universe, providing us with a unique view of the most violent astrophysical objects and allowing us to study the elusive nature of neutrinos,” says Otte. “I am extremely excited about the prospects of pushing to even higher energies and deeper into the universe with the next generation of neutrino experiments planned at Georgia Tech and around the world.”

IceCube is a giant neutrino telescope located at the South Pole. Envisioned by Halzen in the late 1980s and completed in 2011, the instrument detects neutrinos, tiny high-energy particles that travel through the universe and rarely interact with matter. Scientists study neutrinos to better understand phenomena such as supermassive black holes and exploding stars.

Georgia Tech has been a member of the IceCube Collaboration since 2008. The collaboration includes more than 400 physicists from 58 institutions in 14 countries.

Georgia Tech researchers continue to shape neutrino astronomy by contributing to next-generation observatories. Taboada leads the design of the trigger system for the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) Observatory, and Otte is the principal investigator of the NSF-funded Trinity Neutrino Observatory in Utah.

For people living with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the answer can be unexpectedly complicated. Over time, AMD can blur the details that make a face familiar: a crooked smile, a furrowed brow, the expressions that make someone unmistakably themselves.

But vision loss affects more than sight.

“You’re looking at your loved ones, but you’re not really seeing them,” said Soyoun Jang, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate in digital media and the project’s lead researcher. “Macular degeneration requires us to build new relationships with not just other people, but the world that surrounds us.”

AMD gradually damages the macula, the part of the eye responsible for sharp central vision. As their sight changes, patients can use vision training to make better use of the sight they still have.

But Jang and a team of Georgia Tech researchers wondered whether that training could do something else: help people with AMD stay connected to family and friends.

Special Delivery

The answer arrived in a place few researchers would think to look: a mailbox.

The team created Macular Mailbox, a virtual reality prototype that combines vision-training exercises with personalized digital postcards that connect patients with family members and clinicians.

Each completed exercise delivers more than feedback — it delivers a message.

Inside the prototype, users focus on a postcard image as part of a vision-training exercise. When they complete the task, the postcard flips over, revealing a message and voice note.

Instead of earning points or badges, users receive something personal: a grandchild’s voice, a note from a spouse, or an update from another family member.

Signed, Sealed

The researchers chose postcards because they offered something familiar to older adults inside an unfamiliar technology.

“A postcard isn’t new,” Jang said. “It’s probably the oldest thing in the whole Macular Mailbox system.” Its front-and-back format also fit the exercise, and postcards do not require family members to be available at the same time.

Sending postcards back wasn’t part of the original design. The idea came later: What if patients could make something of their own and send it back?

Write Back

Until then, the mailbox only accepted incoming mail. The team decided the mailbox needed a return address.

The updated prototype allows patients to take a picture, record a message, and create their own digital postcard. And the act of making it becomes part of the training: framing a photo and holding focus use some of the same visual skills patients have been practicing.

The person receiving care could now make something and send it back.

Postcards might carry a glimpse of the garden, a pet curled up in a chair, or a sunset from the porch.

Keep in Touch

Many vision rehabilitation tools focus on reading, navigation, and other daily tasks. This project puts people at the center — not how well they can read a screen or navigate a room, but how they can remain part of the moments, relationships, and routines that make up everyday life.

“What this project offers is a different way of thinking about care,” Jang said. “Not just one way, but really putting family, clinician, and patient at the same table.”

For now, Macular Mailbox remains a prototype.

The next step is a series of co-design workshops with patients, family members, and clinicians. Participants will test the headset and help the researchers better understand each group’s roles, concerns, goals, and constraints.

                                                               _____________________________

AMD can make it difficult to look directly at someone you love and see the details that make them familiar, but connection lives beyond what the eye can see. It exists in the sound of their voice, an inside joke, or a moment in an ordinary day. And at the mailbox, there’s still something to send back — and someone waiting to receive it.

Jang, S., Huang, H., Hanna, B. E., Wang, X., Primo, S., & Nitsche, M. (2026). Asymmetric VR design to support connected care for older adults with AMD. Design Research Society, 2026: Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.817

The trend is raising concern about how well prepared ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other popular LLMs are to provide appropriate emotional support.

To address this concern, Georgia Tech researchers have developed a new neural framework that examines how different training sources influence empathy and social reasoning within these AI-powered models.

“A lot of people are using LLMs to help process the death of a loved one, or maybe their girlfriend broke up with them, or their boyfriend cheated on them,” said Glenn Matlin, a Ph.D. student in the School of Interactive Computing.

Matlin said the new framework he and a Georgia Tech-led research team have developed audits neural networks with an LLM and estimates the influence documents, transcripts, and other data sources have on a model’s output.

“We’re trying to connect the data to outputs, which is helpful for us in understanding where the information a language model produces comes from,” he said.

Matlin is the lead author of a new paper examining model sourcing for social reasoning and how models mimic human behavior in conversations. The paper will be presented this week at the Conference on Language Modeling in San Francisco.

Matlin said the findings suggest that an objective tone in its output indicates that a model places greater importance on textbooks or similar neutral training sources. An empathetic tone suggests the model values sources with dialogue and conversational examples more.

“We find that models tend to learn better from interpersonal dialogue when it comes to social reasoning,” he said. “Models that are good at social reasoning will rely less on textbooks about human emotions and more on FAQs or customer service dialogue.

“It can read all it wants from texts that explain anger, but that wouldn’t help it determine whether someone is angry.”

Professor Mark Riedl, Matlin’s advisor, said that knowing which sources models value most could enable engineers to alter their behavior.

“The question is, in this vast ocean of documents in this neural network, which ones become important in certain situations, and which ones don’t,” Riedl said. 

“This leads to the potential for interventions in how we train the model. If we want more empathy, we might look to see where it learns empathy and give it more of those documents, fewer of them, or other documents.”

Riedl said the framework can audit an LLM’s sourcing for advice on any topic, from financial to medical.

“We want to help people make more informed decisions about whether they should use AI for a particular task,” he said.

“You might make a different decision about whether to trust the AI’s recommendation if you knew how a skill was learned and which documents influenced that decision. The first step is knowing how it learns, where it learns from, and what documents tend to lead to certain behaviors.”

The findings that Matlin, Riedl, and their collaborators have made so far came through a partnership with the Allen AI Institute (Ai2), which allowed them to audit their open-sourced LLM, Olmo 3.

While not as large as ChatGPT or Claude, Olmo 3’s training data comprises over a billion documents.

Matilin said it’s impossible to know why ChatGPT or Claude behave in certain ways because their parent companies do not disclose their training data. However, Matlin’s study may help researchers to make better guesses about what’s happening behind the scenes.

He added that the study is the first of its kind and scale on an academic level.

“This is the first one that’s ever been done for an open data model of that type,” he said. “We’re providing a view into neural networks that is hard to come by without being in the corporate setting.”

New research from Georgia Tech shows that the contexts in which genes act — lifestyle and environmental factors — are also important in understanding how genes express themselves, and how genetic risk may lead to disease.

In a new study published in Nature Genetics, Pervasive Interactions Between Exposures and Polygenic Risk Can Inform More Effective Clinical and Behavioral Interventions, researchers analyzed the genetic data, health outcomes, and lifestyle factors of over 400,000 individuals. 

“Genetic risk is often seen as something that can’t be controlled, but that approach assumes a determinism that does not reflect reality,” says the study’s corresponding author Greg Gibson, Regents’ Professor, Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences, and director of the Center for Integrative Genomics at Georgia Tech. “Our research shows that people with low genetic risk who live in disadvantaged environments face disease risks similar to those with high genetic risk living in more resourced circumstances.”

The findings suggest that people at highest genetic risk may also be the individuals who benefit the most from targeted interventions — paving the way for more informed genetic counseling and social policy. 

Science at Scale 

Gibson began his career studying the genetics of Drosophila fruit flies before turning his attention to human genetics when he joined Georgia Tech in the late 2000s, soon after the Human Genome Project successfully delivered the first complete sequence of the human genome. “It transformed the way we do this type of research,” he recalls. “Suddenly it was possible to analyze genetics across large groups of people.” 

Because the effects of genetics can be small in an individual, large datasets are key to understanding genetics and disease at scale. “If we need to study 200,000 people to see a genetic effect, it takes even more than that to see how those genes interact with the environment,” Gibson says.  

The team, which included first author Sini Nagpal, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Tech Center for Integrative Genomics, leveraged the UK Biobank, a program that collects genetic information from half a million volunteers in the United Kingdom to understand who falls ill and why. Started in 2006, the UK Biobank is home to the world’s largest single set of genetic sequencing data — along with the world’s largest whole-body imaging and long-term health tracking. This type of data is critical, Gibson says, to the advancement of genetic research, and is in large part what has made this new research possible. 

“Our research shows that we do have a way to capture situations where a person’s lifestyle and environment interacts with genetics in interesting ways,” he explains. “These genotype-environment interactions matter. They are important, but they can't be captured one variant at a time. An integrated approach — utilizing information in the thousands of genes influencing each disease — is much more powerful.” 

Improving Health Outcomes — For Everyone 

The team is now interested in expanding their research outside of the British database. Nagpal is now an assistant professor at the Koita Centre for Digital Health at IIT Bombay, where she is investigating translational genetics in India, including research into diabetes, cardiovascular disease and asthma.  Gibson is interested in translating the research to more broadly apply to the United States, with a focus on rural and disadvantaged communities. 

“Ultimately, if we can quantify which people are at highest risk, we believe we can suggest therapeutic and environmental interventions that could help mitigate their risk, reducing the prevalence of disease in the first place,” he says. 

“We want to dig deeply in ways that reveal disease pathways and begin to unearth the mechanisms behind disease,” Gibson says. “It's not just our ancestry that determines health; it's also culture and environment. We want to incorporate those factors into treatment of individuals and at scale.” 

These themes are also present in Gibson’s newly published book, Natural Virtue: Genetics, Anti-Eugenics, and Moral Philosophy, which explores how nature and nurture impact social issues like educational and gender disparities. 

Gibson adds that the message is hopeful. “The genetic differences between different socioeconomic groups aren’t meaningful,” he explains. “Our genetics do not predetermine our health outcomes. If we can create more equitable environments, we can improve outcomes across the board.”

Hosted at the Georgia Tech Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, the workshop was organized by a committee of researchers and practitioners from across the macro-energy systems community. The committee was chaired by Micah Ziegler, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. 

The two-day workshop brought together more than 130 participants and featured lightning talks, poster presentations, interactive learning sessions, and keynote addresses that strengthened connections across the macro-energy systems research community.

“The energy challenges facing society today are increasingly interconnected, and solving them requires a systems-level perspective,” said Christine Conwell, director of planning and operations at the Georgia Tech Strategic Energy Institute. “Supporting events like the MES Workshop, which provides a unique space for academic collaboration and knowledge sharing, aligns with the Strategic Energy Institute’s commitment to advancing research and workforce development that support more resilient and effective energy solutions.”

The workshop received financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which supports research and education in science, technology, engineering, math, and economics. Through its Energy and Environment program, the foundation helps advance interdisciplinary research and collaboration across the macro-energy systems field.

“The Macro-Energy Systems Workshop has become a significant forum for interdisciplinary energy systems researchers to share and discuss their work,” said Evan Michelson, director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Energy and Environment program. “We were especially glad to help ensure participation from early-career researchers spanning a wide range of institutions, providing them access to the collaborations and conversations that will help them develop as scientists.”

Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars played a central role in this year's workshop, presenting research on energy system planning, grid reliability, technology deployment, energy transitions, and policy. Their sessions gave the early-career researchers opportunities to share new approaches to studying large-scale energy systems, interact with faculty and industry experts, refine research ideas, and build collaborations beyond their home institutions.

“This year, we significantly expanded the MES Workshop to include more early-career scholars,” said Ziegler. “The workshop provides a great opportunity for young researchers to develop ideas, connections, and a better understanding of how to design research to have a positive impact on the world.”

The workshop also featured keynote presentations from Kelly Sanders, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California, and Erin Mayfield, assistant professor at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering. Both speakers discussed insights from their experience contributing to policymaking and highlighted opportunities for energy systems research to inform policy decisions.

Interactive sessions led by Michelle Graff, assistant professor in the Georgia Tech Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy encouraged participants to consider how macro-energy systems research can more effectively inform and support policymakers and other decision-makers. Graff developed and facilitated the sessions, with support from Morgan Edwards, assistant professor of public affairs from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Micah Ziegler. The first session explored how researchers can identify policy windows and position their work to inform decision-making at the right time. The second focused on matching research to the appropriate audiences and jurisdictions, highlighting opportunities to inform policy at the state and local levels.

Designed for industry professionals, policymakers, educators, students, community leaders, and members of the public, the lunchtime webinar series provided an accessible introduction to the key issues influencing the nuclear energy sector at a time of growing interest in nuclear power as part of the global energy transition.

The series began on Aug. 20 with The New Nuclear, presented by Steven Biegalski, chair of the Nuclear and Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics program. The session examined the evolution of nuclear reactor technology, from today's operating fleet and the AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle to emerging small modular reactors and advanced reactor designs.

The second webinar, held Sept. 3, focused on the economics and policy landscape of nuclear power. Laura Taylor, director of EPIcenter and professor of economics at Georgia Tech, joined Stephen Comello, executive vice president and executive director of the Nuclear Scaling Initiative at the EFI Foundation, to discuss the economic drivers, policy considerations, and opportunities influencing nuclear energy development in the United States.

The series concluded on Sept. 17 with a discussion of nuclear fuel, security, and geopolitics. Anna Erickson, Woodruff Professor of Nuclear Engineering, and Rachel Whitlark, associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, explored global nuclear energy growth, fuel supply chains, and the policies needed to support the safe, secure deployment of nuclear technologies worldwide.

Recordings and presentation materials from all three sessions are available on the webinar series webpage. Those who were unable to attend can watch the presentations and access the accompanying slides to learn more about the technologies, policies, and global trends shaping the future of nuclear energy.

View webinar recordings and presentation slides on the EPIcenter website.

"The most meaningful breakthroughs happen when intelligent hardware and thoughtful software come together to genuinely help people,” said Tapas Roy, vice president of Device Software and Services at Amazon. “Georgia Tech's world-class expertise in robotics and engineering, paired with Amazon's work in on-device intelligence and artificial intelligence, will accelerate our understanding of systems that can both respond to prompts and anticipate customer needs. I'm excited to see how this collaboration advances the science of how humans and intelligent machines work together.”
 
The Hub’s initial focus areas will explore challenges in autonomous systems, next-generation logistics infrastructure, and low-Earth-orbit communications, drawing on Georgia Tech’s well-known interdisciplinary research approach.
 
Georgia Tech is also joining the Fauna Robotics' ecosystem, using the Sprout research platform to study how humans and robots can live, work, and play side by side. This collaboration opens new ways to study mobility, perception, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Leadership and alumni recently celebrated the launch at Lab 126, with guest appearances from Sprout and Buzz, the Georgia Tech mascot.

The Hub will support:
•    Joint research projects between Georgia Tech faculty and Amazon scientists across scientific disciplines 
•    Regular symposia and workshops to foster collaboration between researchers from both institutions and the broader Atlanta tech community
•    Community outreach programs designed to broaden participation from interdisciplinary scholars and innovators

“Georgia Tech and Amazon have worked together for years across research, technology, and student development," said Tim Lieuwen, Georgia Tech executive vice president for Research. "This new hub puts our partnership to work for Georgia. It connects research, education, and industry in ways that will strengthen our state’s innovation economy and create new opportunities for our students.”

About Georgia Tech
Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation’s top public research universities, preparing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute serves more than 56,000 students from all 50 states and over 146 countries and drives innovation and economic growth through research that benefits Georgia, the nation, and the world.

About Amazon in Georgia
Since 2010, Amazon has invested more than $30 billion in Georgia, supporting more than 30,000 full- and part-time jobs. Amazon’s research and technology teams in the Atlanta area work on challenges spanning supply chain optimization, logistics technology, and cloud computing. The establishment of the Georgia Tech–Amazon Science Hub further deepens Amazon’s engagement with one of the nation’s leading research institutions.

About Fauna Robotics 
Fauna Robotics builds Sprout, a development platform designed to put advanced robotics capabilities into the hands of researchers and developers. Sprout gives builders hands-on access to study mobility, perception, motor control, and manipulation with the ambition to deploy robots into human-centric spaces.
 

Their system means devices can work together like never before, sensing in one part of the body and triggering a therapeutic response elsewhere — perhaps releasing medicine or stimulating a nerve. 

Described Sept. 24 in the journal Science, their communication method is expandable to include multiple interconnected devices across the body, even deep inside the stomach.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

They cite climate models estimating that limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius could require removing approximately 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually by 2050, increasing to 20 billion tons per year by 2100. Current DAC systems remove only thousands of tons of CO₂ annually.

One challenge is improving the solid sorbents that capture CO₂ from ambient air. In collaboration with CarbonCapture Inc., researchers in ChBE have shown that a simple, one-step modification can upgrade a commercial amine resin into a more efficient and durable sorbent for CO₂ capture. They published their findings in Science Advances.

“Achieving economically viable DAC demands major improvements in solid sorbent design and performance,” said study author Professor Christopher W. Jones of ChBE, who noted that the benefits of DAC include its potential scalability, modest land-use requirements, flexibility in plant locations, and access to extensive geological reservoirs for long-term CO₂ storage.

Improving a Commercial Sorbent

Jones and his collaborators found a way to improve the performance of Lewatit VP OC 1065, a commercially available resin already considered a benchmark in the DAC field. The material works for DAC because it’s studded with amine groups, which are chemical sites that grab CO₂ molecules as air passes through the resin.

Rather than design a new sorbent, the researchers built on previous Georgia Tech studies with PPI (poly(propyleneimine)), a polymer that has shown advantages in both CO₂ capture and durability. They developed a simple grafting process that grows PPI directly from amine sites already present on the commercial resin, increasing its ability to capture CO₂.

The process involved soaking the resin in a small, inexpensive molecule called azetidine along with a small amount of acid, and then heating the mixture for two days.

The researchers found the upgraded resin captured about 75 percent more CO₂ than the untreated version under dry conditions that mimic open air, where CO₂ makes up only about 400 parts per million of the surrounding gas.

The material also performed well under simulated industrial flue-gas conditions, where CO₂ is far more concentrated, capturing more than 50 percent more than the untreated resin. 

The team also tested the resin across temperatures ranging from 25 degrees Celsius down to -20 degrees Celsius and across a wide range of humidity levels. In humid air, the modified resin outperformed the original at every temperature tested, though its advantage disappeared in very cold, dry conditions.

Enhancing Durability

Sorbents used in DAC need to survive repeated use, cycling between capturing CO₂ and being heated to release it. Amine-based materials are known to degrade over time when exposed to oxygen. But the branched bPPI chains added by the researchers to the sorbent reduced oxidative degradation by about half.

In tests that simulated 150 rounds of capture and release from industrial exhaust, the modified resin held up significantly better than the original material, the researchers found.

“These commercial resins are already leading candidates for large-scale carbon capture deployment,” said Arkaprabha Giri, a former postdoctoral researcher in Jones’ lab who is the study’s lead author. “If we can meaningfully boost their performance with a process this simple, that’s a real opportunity to speed up deployment without waiting on an entirely new generation of materials.”

Study co-author Omid Ghaffari Nik, Ph.D., vice president of materials science and process at CarbonCapture Inc., said that bringing down the steep cost of DAC is a crucial goal.

“The U.S. Department of Energy has set a target of atmospheric CO₂ capture and storage at less than $100 per net metric ton, emphasizing the need for innovation in sorbent-based DAC systems,” Nik said.

The use of an existing commercial resin and readily available chemicals could offer advantages in eventually scaling up the process, the researchers said. They successfully applied the same method to a second commercial resin, Purolite A110, suggesting the approach isn't limited to one product.

The team has filed a provisional patent and is now working to extend the technique to other amine-based materials, with the aim of scaling the process from lab quantities to the industrial scale.

CITATION: Arkaprabha Giri, UnJin Ryu, Jiaqi Zhang, Opeyemi Ojelade, Wenyang Zhao, Jacob Hoffman, Mark Robertson, Jordi Espín, Madison Nichols, Surya Parker, Omid Ghaffari Nik, and Christopher W. Jones, "In situ azetidine polymerization elevates the performance of commercial polymer resin sorbents in carbon dioxide capture," Science Advances, 2026

Sichen Jin, who graduated in the spring with a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, said students in this situation should make good use of their internships.

Jin speaks from experience because she wasn’t sure which path to take when she started her Ph.D. 

“I think that was always an open question to me,” she said. “I was debating between them a lot. I know my first two or three years, I wanted to make sure I got to know what research was like and then try the industry experience.”

Knowing she would complete at least two internships at Georgia Tech, she decided to base her decision on those experiences. 

In 2024, Jin interned at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). She helped design a large-scale visual analytics tool powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to help power grid operators make quick, informed decisions.

“The work I did at PNNL was more aligned with the work I was doing in my Ph.D.,” she said. “It was very exploratory. I had free reign to go whatever direction I wanted.”

Jin said her next internship was nothing like her internship at PNNL. She interned at Cisco over the summer and said the main difference was that the work focused on producing research to enhance a product.

She helped Cisco build new pipelines that allowed its products to automate visualizations with AI.

“I think industry’s goal is so different from what academia is looking for,” she said. “Usually, academia wants a novel idea and a demo, but industry wants something reliable, something that is tested repeatedly. There are so many steps before you can release a product. They are driven by results.”

Jin said she gravitated toward that, which pushed her to apply for industry jobs.

She is now a research scientist at Meta.

“I like that the work is straightforward,” she said. “You get a task with a concrete goal, and you aim for it, and you get it solved. There’s tangible output. You get to see what you build be used by users, and your work reaches a lot broader audience. Every decision you make will affect them and whether they are happy with the product.”

Looking back on her experience, Jin said she wouldn’t change how she approached her Ph.D. Whether a doctoral student wants to pursue academia, industry, or is unsure, she said laying a foundation for their research is paramount.

“You need some concrete research outcomes that people know you for, and you need some publications under your belt. Those are the years when you’re still exploring your topic or research. Most of the time, your advisor can’t tell you what the topic of your dissertation, so you need to figure it out. Doing a research-oriented internship can help you do that.”

Jin added that all students should experience both sides to ensure they make the best choice.

“You might find that you are doing research that is aligned with the industry’s needs. Then you might want to get a sense of what that looks like; you can do an engineering or product-driven internship. You can make fair comparisons and not regret your decision.”

Those conversations led Raymaker to focus her research on maritime security, including vulnerabilities in the Automatic Identification System (AIS), which ships use to broadcast their location, speed, and course.

This summer, Raymaker brought this research to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory, where she built a test bed to study AIS security in a controlled environment. The experience has also led to new research questions, from the security of shipboard Starlink connections to autonomous vessels and other maritime technologies.

We spoke with Raymaker about her research, her experience at Lincoln Laboratory, and what she hopes to investigate next.

What will you be working on at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory next?

After submitting our paper based on this summer’s work to a cybersecurity conference, we are continuing our collaboration and starting a new project to identify critical infrastructure that uses unique protocols. The project is still in the early stages of planning and design, but I’m excited to continue working with the team.

What was the biggest challenge you faced while building and testing the AIS security testbed, and how did you work through it?

The biggest challenge was getting equipment designed to be installed and operated on a boat to function properly in a lab setting. That meant using a Faraday cage so that our AIS transmissions and security experiments wouldn’t accidentally broadcast to nearby ships or interfere with real maritime traffic. I also had to simulate GPS signals and set up additional hardware to trick the AIS transponders into thinking they were operating on a real vessel. Putting all those pieces together into a safe, realistic test bed was challenging, but it ultimately let us study the equipment in a controlled environment.

You mentioned the collaborative culture at Lincoln Laboratory. Can you share a specific interaction or experience with a researcher there that had an impact on you or your work?

Working with Hamed Okhravi, a senior staff member at Lincoln Laboratory, was an amazing experience. He was my mentor and consistently went out of his way to connect me with people who could help me find datasets, access equipment, or get the lab space I needed for my work. For example, when I realized I needed a Faraday cage for my experiments, he connected me with the Mobile Device Lab and helped me get access very quickly. The lab manager was also immediately willing to let me use the space and equipment. That experience really reflected the culture I saw throughout Lincoln Laboratory. Everyone genuinely wanted to help each other get what they needed to move their research forward.

How did Georgia Tech prepare you for the work at Lincoln Laboratory, and did the internship change how you think about your research or future career?

My experience at Georgia Tech was instrumental in preparing me for my work at Lincoln Laboratory. The way I was taught to think through difficult research problems and work independently toward solutions translated well to a large research lab. I was able to hit the ground running and take ownership of a project because Georgia Tech had prepared me to lead research independently. The internship also gave me valuable experience in a research environment outside academia, which broadened my perspective on how I could pursue research in the future.

You’ve said you want to work through the cybersecurity problems mariners have shared with you “one by one.” Which problem do you most want to tackle next, and why?

Next, I’d love to look at Starlink connectivity for ships or for autonomous shipping. Mariners we’ve spoken with have raised concerns about both. With Starlink and increasingly autonomous vessels, they worry that greater remote connectivity could give attackers new ways to access onboard systems and disrupt ship operations. I think those concerns are worth investigating.

We recently had a paper accepted at CCS that examines exposed solar distributed energy resources, and I think applying a similar perspective to exposed maritime equipment could be very interesting. That paper is available here.

We also recently had a paper on measuring GPS spoofing of ships accepted at IEEE S&P. The full paper isn’t online yet, but the project was directly motivated by mariners telling us that they were struggling with GPS spoofing. That made me want to find a way to systematically measure where spoofing was occurring. 

Ultimately, the goal is to turn that kind of research into something useful for mariners, such as warning them when they are entering an area experiencing spoofing or when their own vessel may be affected and they should no longer trust their GPS. That is the kind of research I’d like to continue doing: listening to the problems mariners are actually experiencing and finding ways to investigate and address them.

Photos by Kevin Beasley and Terence Rushin/College of Computing

Few neuroscientists would dispute that the brain relies on prediction. From houseflies evading swatters to humans catching baseballs, living things are constantly anticipating what comes next. Understanding how the brain generates those predictions could help explain one of neuroscience's most enduring questions: how the brain builds internal models of the world that allow us to learn, adapt, and anticipate what comes next.

“Without actively predicting the world, we cannot survive,” says Farzaneh Najafi, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a faculty affiliate of Georgia Tech's Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society. “There is quite some sensory-motor delay in the processing. We can’t just sit there, wait for the brain to process our environment, and then react.”

Part of the puzzle may lie in signals known as neural ramps. Almost like a drumroll leading up to a big reveal, neurons in some areas of the brain have shown gradual increases in activity immediately before a stimulus appears. For decades, researchers have interpreted this ramping activity as a neural signature of prediction, reflecting anticipation of an upcoming event.

Recently published in Science Advances, a new study from Najafi’s lab reveals these signals may not be “predictions” at all, but instead a way neurons track elapsed time.

“Surprisingly,” says Najafi, “the very first study from my lab called the Predictive Processing Lab showed that no, these are not prediction signals.”

The finding challenges a long-standing interpretation of one of neuroscience's most studied signals and reveals that the search for predictive neurons may lead to different circuits — or require different experiments to uncover. 

As many organizations and businesses are turning to AI to improve workplace efficiency, risk remains high. Between overlooked footnotes and misread graphics, small mistakes can have expensive consequences. 

To address this challenge, researchers from Georgia Tech and J.P. Morgan developed SlideAgent. The new framework helps large language models (LLMs) better understand complex visual documents like presentation slide decks, brochures, and reports. 

SlideAgent works by breaking documents into multiple levels, allowing the model to analyze both the big picture and the fine details. This human-inspired approach leads to more accurate and reliable interpretation than existing systems. 

Beyond improving workplace tools, SlideAgent also points to a broader shift in AI. Instead of building only larger and more powerful models, the work shows how smarter design and more efficient reasoning can improve performance. 

“Multimodal LLMs such as GPT, Gemini, and Claude, can save people time and reduce the mental effort required to understand these documents, but they remain imperfect,” said Yiqiao (Ahren) Jin, a Ph.D. candidate in Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).

“In high-stakes fields such as finance, for example, misreading a number, overlooking a footnote, or making an incorrect comparison across pages could affect reporting, risk assessment, or strategic decisions.” 

The researchers tested SlideAgent on a wide range of real-world documents, including financial presentations, technical slides, and visual question-answering datasets. 

The system consistently outperformed leading commercial models and open-source tools throughout the evaluation. In some cases, it improved accuracy by up to 10%. The gains were especially strong on more complex tasks, such as comparing information across slides or understanding how visuals relate to each other on a page.

“We found the results very encouraging. SlideAgent reaches an improvement of 7.9% over its proprietary base model and 9.8% over the evaluated open-source base models,” said Jin, the project’s lead researcher. 

“These are meaningful gains given the strength of the underlying multimodal models and the difficulty of the tasks.” 

Current multimodal AI systems often process entire pages at once. This approach can lead to mistakes, such as miscounting items in a chart or overlooking important details in dense visuals.

SlideAgent addresses this by mimicking how people read documents. Instead of treating each page as a single unit, the system looks at information at three levels: the full document, individual pages, and specific elements like charts, tables, and text blocks.

A network of agents, each specialized for a specific level, divides and coordinates analysis. Then, SlideAgent combines outputs to build a structured understanding of the overall document. This allows it to answer questions more accurately and reason across multiple pages.

“The central inspiration was how people naturally read a long presentation,” Jin said.

“We first develop an understanding of the overall narrative, then identify the relevant pages or sections, and finally zoom in on individual charts, tables, or text blocks when precise evidence is needed.”

The work highlights a growing challenge with AI. As systems become more popular and more powerful, users increasingly discover the technology’s limitations. This is especially true for real-world tasks that require structured reasoning and contextual understanding.

SlideAgent shows that better performance does not always come from building bigger models. Instead, it points to smarter ways of organizing how AI processes information that can lead to improvement.

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) accepted SlideAgent for presentation at its annual meeting. The 64th ACL 2026 meeting took place July 2-7 in San Diego.

ACL is a scientific and professional organization for researchers in natural language processing (NLP). Its namesake conference is one of the world’s leading venues for presenting NLP research.

ACL 2026 followed a year after Jin completed an internship at J.P. Morgan AI Research, where he worked on SlideAgent. He interned under Rachneet Kaur, Zhen Zeng, and Sumitra Ganesh, all co-authors of the paper. School of CSE Associate Professor Srijan Kumar advises Jin at Georgia Tech.

Along with SlideAgent, Jin authored two other papers accepted at ACL 2026.

“Conferences such as ACL are valuable not only for sharing results, but also for refining future project ideas with the broader community. Discussions across institutions and research areas can reveal limitations, suggest new evaluations, and spark collaborations that are difficult to develop in isolation,” Jin said.

“For SlideAgent, I was particularly interested in feedback on how we can make the framework more computationally efficient without sacrificing accuracy or interpretability.”

This year, Team Blue Water – which features nine Georgia Tech participants –came out on top after three days of intense competition.

“I've competed in DEF CON CTFs for four years now,” said Ph.D. student Kevin Stevens. “After winning second place three years in a row, it's so rewarding to finally achieve first place with such a great team.”

Blue Water finished with 578,103 points, well ahead of second-place team 0x4b52, which scored 454,797 points. SuperDiceCodeLovers took third place with 425,686 points.

The results highlighted Georgia Tech’s strength in the competition. The first-, second-, and third-place teams all included Georgia Tech students or alumni.

Georgia Tech participants on Blue Water included:

• Jalen Chuang, Ph.D. student
• Jiho Kim, Ph.D. student
• Andrew Chin, Ph.D. student
• Youngjoon Kim, postdoctoral researcher
• Kevin Stevens, Ph.D. student
• Yong Hwi Jin, Ph.D. student
• Sunghyeon Jo, Ph.D. student
• Yu-Fu Fu, Ph.D. student
• Gye Jin Lee, Ph.D. student

Blue Water consisted of members from Perfect Blue, Water Paddler, r00timentary, RedBud, BunkyoWesterns, and undef1ned. Combining multiple teams into a single roster is common at DEF CON CTF.

The competition unfolded over three days, with teams competing for about seven hours on each of the first two days and an additional two and a half hours on the final day. However, the work continued beyond the competition's official hours. The teams were allowed to continue working through the evenings and nights to find vulnerabilities, protect their systems, and gain points.

The challenges were designed by the Benevolent Bureau of Birds, the group that had won the competition for the past four years under the team name Maple Mallard Magistrates. The group is a collaboration between Plaid Parliament of Pwning from Carnegie Mellon University, The Duck from Theori Inc., and Maple Bacon from the University of British Columbia.

This year’s bird-themed competition featured a wide range of technical challenges, including escaping game softlocks, programming in a custom bird emoji language, working with a custom computer architecture and using Game of Life patterns for data exfiltration. Other challenges included a bot battleground, protecting the 1994 Netscape Navigator browser, and exploring a reimagined version of the internet built around “bird HTTP” and “bird CSS.”

For Stevens, one of his contributions to the winning effort focused on a new competition mechanic introduced this year, the “rebate mechanic.”

Teams could earn partial points back for flags stolen from them if they recovered those flags from recorded network traffic. Stevens created and maintained a service to manage the new mechanic, adding another layer of strategy to an already complex competition.

The victory adds another accomplishment to Georgia Tech’s growing record in elite cybersecurity competitions, where students regularly apply classroom knowledge and research skills into practice against some of the strongest teams in the field.

“SCP students and their collaborators continue to excel, winning elite cybersecurity competitions, including this year’s CTF at DEF CON,” said Mustaque Ahamad, interim chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP).

“This is because of the excellence of our students and the SCP research projects and courses that prepare them with the advanced knowledge and skills needed to discover and mitigate the most challenging security vulnerabilities in systems on which we all rely.”

The team also found that the new standard's core rules for sending messages and handling errors retain every known security weakness of older versions.

The vulnerabilities could allow an attacker who has already gained access to a vehicle's internal computer network to change or intercept messages, take individual vehicle computers offline, send different information to different systems, or disrupt network communication.

CAN Extra Long (CAN XL), the latest version of the controller area network (CAN), is designed for future cars and other vehicles that need to move large amounts of data between onboard computers. The technology is not yet widely deployed in production vehicles, giving manufacturers an opportunity to address security concerns before it becomes more common.

“Because it isn't widely deployed yet, we have a narrow window to get its security right,” said Associate Professor Saman Zonouz of the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, one of the researchers on the project. 

“Fixing a standard now is far easier than fixing it once it's built into the hardware of millions of cars that stay on the road for a decade or more.”

Zonouz said CAN XL is expected to become the primary version of CAN, the network that enables computers inside a vehicle to communicate. It is also expected to serve as the main network for driver-assistance systems in future vehicles.

The researchers confirmed the seven vulnerabilities in commercial CAN XL hardware and demonstrated attacks using a physical test setup that mimics a vehicle network.

Modern vehicles can have dozens of electronic control units that manage systems such as sensors, brakes, steering, and entertainment. These computers need to communicate quickly and reliably.

For decades, many vehicles have used CAN for this communication. However, the original version, known as classic CAN, was not designed to handle the volume of data generated by newer vehicle technologies.

CAN XL was developed to provide faster communication, larger messages, and new security features, but the researchers wanted to know whether the new standard’s basic rules were secure. Their testing revealed that they weren’t. They discovered that an attacker who controls one computer on the network could intercept and replace messages or take a targeted computer offline.

“These flaws are in the standard itself, so every device built to follow it inherits them,” Zonouz said. “With CAN XL, there's still time to fix these problems before they reach the road.”

The attacks would require an attacker to first gain control of a computer connected to the vehicle's internal network. The research does not show that CAN XL itself provides a means to break into a vehicle. Instead, it shows what an attacker could do after gaining access.

Several attacks were also faster and harder to detect than similar attacks against classic CAN, according to the authors.

The researchers proposed changes to the CAN XL rules to prevent several of the attacks. They also recommended additional security measures, including message authentication and systems that can detect unusual activity.

The team reported the vulnerabilities and informed the manufacturers of the commercial devices it tested about the bugs it found. One company has already released a fix. The researchers hope their findings will help manufacturers address security weaknesses before the technology becomes more widely used.

A Formal Security Analysis of CAN XL was published in the Proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium, held Aug. 12-14 in Baltimore, MD. The paper was also named a runner-up for a distinguished paper award.

The study was conducted by Georgia Tech Ph.D. student ZhaozhouTang, Professor Vijay Ganesh, Zonouz, and Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Raheem Beyah, along with Khaled Serag of the Qatar Computing Research Institute and Z. Berkay Celik of Purdue University.

The paper and its findings result from projects sponsored by the Hyundai America Technical Center, the Georgia Department of Transportation, and the $7 million CHORUS Center through the National Science Foundation’s Cyber-Physical System Frontier Program.

To improve robot performance and advance memory capabilities needed for reliable home use, Georgia Tech researchers have developed a new benchmark to evaluate the memory capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs).

That includes Gemini 2.0-flash and GPT-4o.

In-home assistive robots could clean and organize a home while the owner is away, but without enhanced memory capabilities, they could cause more problems than they solve.

They could, for example, cause a major inconvenience if they move important objects like wallets and keys but are unable to tell the owner where they put them.

A new benchmark created by Georgia Tech researchers tests the memory capability of vision-language models (VLMs), including Gemini 2.0-flash and GPT-4o, to determine whether they could improve robot performance.

Zsolt Kira, an associate professor in Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, said that most active VLMs can process only a few hundred images at a time before forgetting them.

“There wasn’t a benchmark that could test these specialized capabilities that we might want from a robot,” Kira said. “Our purpose in creating one is to spur research in this area so that others can develop methods to solve this problem.”

The team’s benchmark consists of memory evaluations based on 60 tasks that require continuous engagement and contextual and environmental awareness. Three task categories — spatial, temporal, and multi-goal — are highly difficult.

“You can chat with a language model like ChatGPT, and it remembers all the text from your previous conversations with it because the text data is small in terms of storage,” Kira said. 

“Embodied agents and robots observe a lot of videos, and those tend to be a lot harder to recall. If you ask it where your diary is, it must efficiently store images of your diary and where it is.

“That’s just a few frames out of a million that it recorded since yesterday, and it must know where that is relative to the spatial layout of the house.”

Karmesh Yadav, a Ph.D. student in Kira’s lab, said users don’t want to repeat information about their preferences after deployment. They also expect the robot to maintain long-term memory.

“In reality, you would want it to have a memory of the entire time it has been in your house, whether that’s days or years,” Yadav said.

The team’s benchmark evaluates memory performance over an average one-day period. It challenges the models with commands like “navigate to an object you did not interact with yesterday” or “navigate to a room you did not visit yesterday.”

The results show that current state-of-the-art models have a long way to go before they can be used in embodied agents. The best model achieved roughly a 50% success rate on high-level difficulty tasks.

Surprisingly, this model wasn’t Gemini or GPT VLMs. It was an open-source reasoning model from Qwen. 

“If you use an open-source reasoning model, even one that’s small in size, it can match the performance of closed-source non-reasoning models,” Yadav said. “Reasoning models can look at the video and translate it into text. It describes what’s going on in the video in words and determines the right frame to choose in its final output.”

Kira said that converting images into descriptive text that language models easily understand could be one way to circumvent the memory storage dilemma. Another way could be to assign a hierarchy that teaches the model to identify irrelevant or redundant images and erase them from storage.

Whatever future progress researchers make in those areas, Kira and his students are confident that their benchmark will remain relevant. 

“This benchmark is scalable,” said Ph.D. student Yusuf Ali. “If two years from now, videos are easy for a model to understand and store, you can use the same infrastructure we propose and scale up the problem’s difficulty.”

Yadav and Ali are co-first authors of a paper on the benchmark, presented in early September at the 2026 European Conference on Computer Vision in Sweden.

For more information about the project, click here.

The study is timely, arriving amid widespread public discontent over rising fuel prices, with voter frustrations reflected in a series of national polls blaming the Trump administration.

Although the researchers do not determine how much of the price differences across administrations, if any, are caused by presidents themselves, they argue economists may have been too confident in dismissing the possibility without much direct evidence.

“If economists really think that the president doesn't have influence, the burden of proof is on economists to explain that these differences can't be interpreted as the result of each president's actions," Brewer said.

Read the full story.

For decades, immunologists have known that the body's most durable defenses depend on plasma cells, the antibody-producing cells responsible for long-term immune memory. Long after an infection has passed or a vaccine has been administered, these cells continue releasing protective antibodies, sometimes for decades. 

The CHORUS (Community Hubs for Optimizing Resilience) project will collaborate with coastal communities in Georgia and New York and will be split into two pieces: technology development and community engagement. 

“We’re not just building a simulator and hoping it fits the needs of coastal residents,” explains Alex Robel, project leader and Jean “Chris” Purvis Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "By collaborating with community partners from the very beginning, we can ensure that what we ultimately develop will be effective because the people who will be using it are helping design it.”

Putting Flood Modeling in Residents' Hands

The technology development component will include faculty from the College of Sciences and the College of Computing. The College of Sciences team will develop an AI-based flood simulator and the College of Computing team led by Josiah Hester, associate professor and Catherine M. and James E. Allchin Early Career Professor, will create a web platform that allows users to visualize potential flood impacts.

Traditional flood models can take hours or days to generate results and often require specialized expertise and expensive computing resources. The CHORUS platform will be designed to provide easy-to-understand results in seconds, producing building-scale flood maps that show how water moves through streets, yards, and structures during a range of flooding scenarios. Researchers will use the model to test how specific interventions, such as seawalls, restored marshes, or improved stormwater infrastructure, could affect flooding.

Eventually, users will be able to test their own scenarios through the browser-based tool, enabling them to explore how different decisions could change flood impacts in their communities:

“Users will be able to go into a web browser and indicate where a sea wall could go or change a parking lot into a porous vegetated landscape, then click simulate. Within a few seconds, they’ll have a new flood map showing the impacts of these interventions,” says Robel.

A Community-Driven Approach

A collaborative effort with the New York Climate Exchange, the project will be funded by Georgia Sea Grant and IBM, with support from Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow (GT2), Georgia Tech’s Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub, and the National Sea Grant College Program. The CHORUS project is an initiative of the New York Climate Exchange, where Georgia Tech is a core partner institution.

Community engagement in Georgia is being led by CEAR and the Pin Point Betterment Association, which represents descendants of the historic Gullah Geechee community near Savannah. In New York, the project team is partnering with the New York Climate Exchange and the Waterfront Alliance to work with communities surrounding Jamaica Bay.

“What makes this partnership meaningful is that it puts community voices at the center,” says Jasmine Smith, president of the Pin Point Betterment Association. “Too often, decisions are made to ‘better’ communities without actually involving the people who live there. We hope this partnership can serve as a blueprint for how communities are included in future sustainability projects from the very beginning.”

The project includes community advisory boards and technical advisory boards in both locations. Community members will help identify priority assets, select flood scenarios for analysis, and shape the design of the web-based tool. They’ll also test and offer feedback. Technical advisory boards made up of local officials, planners, and other experts will help evaluate the feasibility of proposed solutions.

“The aim is to blend information from both groups without allowing the technical perspective to override community priorities,” says Robel.

According to Robel, giving communities direct access to flood modeling tools can help close the gap between public input and infrastructure planning.

“We are putting decision making in the hands of the community. With a tool like this, the community can say: ‘We want to prevent flooding at this community center, this school, or this road,’” says Robel. “They can run the model, produce data, and present it to local governments or the Army Corps of Engineers  — advocating for potential solutions themselves rather than relying on outside experts.”

Robel sees this project as just the beginning:

“Funded by two-year grants, CHORUS is meant to be a pilot for how this kind of community-centered project can be done. Once we understand some of the challenges and opportunities involved, it will hopefully make it easier for us to scale this work to additional community partners.”

About Community-Engaged Research at Georgia Tech

Georgia Tech is actively working to foster more projects that foster community engagement. Collaborative groups at Georgia Tech involved in the CHORUS project include:

• The CEAR Hub, part of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), and housed at the Georgia Tech Savannah campus, advances community-engaged research and planning throughout coastal Georgia, helping communities build resilience to environmental and climate challenges. 
• The Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE) trains faculty, students, and staff in best practices for conducting community-engaged research as well as facilitating connections directly with communities.
• The Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) houses SCoRE and is Georgia Tech’s point of contact to the New York Climate Exchange. BBISS forms partnerships like these to fulfill its mission to expand the reach and impact of Georgia Tech’s sustainability research. 

The agreement was signed during a Sept. 14 visit by PNNL leadership to Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility. It builds on years of successful collaboration between researchers at the two institutions. 

The enhanced collaboration has three primary goals: solving big problems through multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research; sustaining and engaging human capital by creating opportunities for students, faculty, researchers, and interns to work on complex real-world challenges; and accelerating technology adoption by taking scientific discoveries and innovations into industry and the federal marketplace.

"Strengthening our partnerships with national laboratories is a strategic priority for Georgia Tech,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech. "PNNL is an outstanding partner, and we look forward to deepening connections among our researchers and students, expanding opportunities and access to world-class capabilities and facilities, and advancing discovery, innovation, and national impact together."

PNNL is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory that advances scientific discovery and innovations that support reliable energy, national security, and economic competitiveness. Georgia Tech is one of the nation's leading research universities, conducting more than $1.5 billion in research annually and pursuing a mission to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

"PNNL and Georgia Tech have a long history of working together," said Deb Gracio, laboratory director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “This agreement provides the foundation to take on difficult research challenges and to leverage our complementary expertise and investments in the years ahead.”

The Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) has played a central role in advancing Georgia Tech's engagement with the national laboratory system and connecting researchers with partnership opportunities.

"As SEI takes on a greater role in coordinating Georgia Tech's national laboratory partnerships, this agreement with PNNL demonstrates how we are building stronger pathways for faculty, researchers, and students to engage with world-class national lab capabilities," said Yuanzhi Tang, SEI executive director.

The National Laboratory Partnership Program supports engagement between Georgia Tech and the U.S. national laboratories. SEI now leads the program, with ongoing support from Georgia Tech’s Office of the Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research. The agreement with PNNL is the first formal agreement established through the program since its transition to SEI.

"This MOU formalizes and strengthens relationships that have been growing for many years," said Scott McWhorter, SEI director of national laboratory partnerships. “It leverages the unique strengths of Georgia Tech and PNNL and provides a framework for expanding engagement across areas of mutual interest.”

Georgia Tech and PNNL bring complementary strengths in energy and environmental systems, electric grid resilience, cybersecurity of critical infrastructure, alternative fuels and advanced materials, biofuels, radiation detection, data science and visual analytics, nuclear nonproliferation, and national security. These capabilities will be brough together through two upcoming Genesis Mission projects.

Bill Pike, PNNL's deputy director for Science and Technology, who joined the laboratory’s leadership delegation for the MOU signing, said the projects reflect the growing partnership and expanding collaboration between the two institutions. 

About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's leading research universities, with strengths spanning engineering, computing, science, business, design, and the liberal arts. With more than $1.5 billion annually in research awards across its Colleges and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech is among the nation's most research-intensive universities. The Institute's mission is to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

About Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

For students seeking international experience, studying abroad can offer opportunities that extend well beyond the classroom. Computer Science (CS) Student Nicholas Byrd’s year-long experience in Germany gave him the chance to study CS at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and to intern at TNG Technology Consulting. 

Saman Zonouz, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is helping address those concerns as a member of a planning committee for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Since May 2026, Zonouz has served on the planning committee for an upcoming public workshop on integrating AI into the electricity system. The workshop is scheduled for Oct. 26 and will convene experts to discuss how to safely and reliably use AI across the power grid.

The workshop will explore how AI is used today, the challenges of integrating AI into existing power systems, and how people and AI can work together. The event will also examine relationships between AI and cybersecurity, data centers, workforce development, and future research.

For Zonouz, cybersecurity and resilience are key parts of the conversation.

“AI is both a shield and a target for the grid,” Zonouz said.

Zonouz leads Georgia Tech’s Cyber-Physical Systems Security Research Laboratory. The lab’s research, much of it funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, investigates how AI can protect power systems from cyberattacks.

One recent initiative combines AI with detailed knowledge about power system operations to detect attacks in near real time. Another project sought to identify security weaknesses in solar inverters and other devices that connect energy sources, such as solar panels, to the power grid.

Regardless of the challenge, Zonouz and his lab work to identify and fix these weaknesses before attackers can exploit them. Despite their best efforts, however, Zonouz said that some AI tools meant to secure a system can create new ways for attackers to target a power grid.

The lab has demonstrated in several studies that AI systems can be tricked by false or manipulated data. Attackers can also target the software and systems that AI depends on. As AI becomes more advanced, some systems may even be able to modify grid operations.

This raises an important question: What happens if an AI system fails or is attacked?

“That is why the right frame is resilience,” Zonouz said.

For Zonouz, the goal is not to create an AI system that can never fail or be attacked. It’s to build a trustworthy power grid that can continue operating safely even if an AI system fails or is compromised.

Zonouz will bring his perspective to the National Academies workshop. In addition to helping organize the event, he will lead a session on cybersecurity and resilience. He will also help summarize the workshop’s key takeaways during the closing session. The workshop will be held virtually in late October.  

“Lessons learned from the electricity grid can be applied to other critical infrastructure as AI monitoring and control tools continue to advance and become more common,” he said.

Before a promising new therapy can reach a patient, researchers need to answer a deceptively simple question: Will it work? 

His paper, “Brain Speaks Louder Than Words: Neurophysiological Opinion Inference via Cognitive Dissonance Triggers,” recently received the 2026 Dr. Hermann Zemlicka Award for the most visionary paper at the NeuroIS Retreat. 

Wu discusses the research, its potential applications, and the ethical and privacy considerations it raises.

Q&A With D.J. 

What was your reaction when you learned your paper received the 2026 Dr. Hermann Zemlicka Award for “most visionary” research?

The Dr. Hermann Zemlicka Award is presented annually at the NeuroIS Retreat to the paper selected as the year’s “most visionary.” I was surprised and deeply honored to receive it. The recognition was especially meaningful because it affirmed our vision of bringing neuroscience and information systems research together to explore a new way of understanding human opinions.

For readers unfamiliar with your research, what problem were you trying to solve?

We wanted to find a better way to understand people’s opinions in situations where traditional methods, like surveys or tracking behavior, may be biased, intrusive, slow, or difficult to use. Our research explores whether brief brain activity measured by electroencephalography (EEG) can reveal when a statement matches or conflicts with a person’s beliefs. If so, it could provide another way to understand opinions without relying only on what people say or how they behave.

Most people are used to answering surveys, reviews, and polls. What made you wonder if there might be a better way to understand what people really think?

Surveys are extremely useful, but they depend on people actively participating. Those answers can be shaped by factors such as memory, the way a question is worded, social pressure, or a person’s ability and willingness to respond. We wondered whether brain activity could offer another way to understand people’s opinions, especially in situations where those challenges come into play. We wanted to see whether we could capture an immediate reaction before a person has to translate it into words.

The paper title, “Brain Speaks Louder Than Words,” is interesting. Can you give an example of what that means in everyday life?

Imagine someone is asked to rate the statement, “I like this product or service.” Even if they feel pressure to give a positive answer, their brain may respond differently depending on whether the statement matches their experience. Our method looks for patterns of brain activity that occur when there is a mismatch between what a person truly believes and what they are evaluating. It is not mind-reading or lie detection. Instead, it uses the brain’s response to conflicting information as one signal that may help us understand whether a statement reflects someone’s genuine opinion.

Were there any findings that surprised you or challenged what you expected going into the project?

One finding was that cognitive conflict depended on more than whether a statement contradicted someone’s opinion. When a heuristic cue, a simple signal that offers a mental shortcut, was present, the brain response to a conflicting statement became weaker. Put intuitively, some contextual cues can soften our immediate sense that “this does not match what I believe,” even when our underlying opinion remains unchanged.

Privacy is a growing concern in today's digital world. Can you compare the privacy implication of the proposed approach versus the traditional methods?

Our approach could reduce the need to store information such as browsing histories, ratings, or written survey responses. Instead of continuously tracking a person’s behavior, it focuses on collecting a specific brain response during a defined interaction with the user’s consent.

At the same time, brain activity is sensitive biometric information and could reveal more than what is needed for a particular task. Any privacy benefits therefore depend on robust safeguards, including data minimization, meaningful informed consent, clearly defined limits on data use and retention, and strong data security through offline, locally controlled processing and calibration.

Our study offers some initial guidance on these issues, but more research is needed to fully understand the privacy implications of this approach.

How could this research change the way organizations understand customers, employees, or other stakeholders in real time?

In situations where surveys may not tell the whole story, receiving feedback is difficult, or past behavioral data are unavailable, our research could eventually help organizations better understand how people are reacting in near real time. For example, it could help identify whether stakeholders' immediate responses suggest agreement or disagreement with a message, product, digital experience, or decision.

These insights would not replace surveys. Instead, they could complement them by showing where people's immediate reactions align with, or differ from, what they later report. Any use at the individual level, however, would require informed consent, a clearly defined purpose, and strong privacy safeguards.

The paper points to opportunities for helping people who may have difficulty communicating through traditional methods. What possibilities do you see for making technology more inclusive?

Brain-computer interfaces have already shown promise in helping people with severe motor or communication impairments interact with technology. Our research explores one possible way to better understand a person's opinions or preferences through brain activity during specific tasks. Over time, this type of work could contribute to technologies that are more responsive to individual needs and more accessible for people who face challenges communicating through traditional methods.

For readers who haven’t thought about neuroscience or brain-computer interfaces before, what’s the one takeaway you hope they remember from this research?

Brain signals do not provide a direct window into a person's thoughts. They reflect many different processes happening in the brain and body, which means they can be difficult to interpret.

That is why theory and experimental design matter. Rather than searching brain data for patterns without a clear explanation, our research focuses on a specific mechanism: how people respond to information that conflicts with their beliefs. By testing that idea in a controlled setting and calibrating the approach for each individual, we can make the results more meaningful and easier to interpret.

Learn More: Information Technology Management

Most people would recognize that something unexpected has happened and adjust accordingly.  

For machines, it’s not always that simple.  

Researchers at Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) are addressing this very challenge: how can autonomous systems recognize when something unexpected has happened, determine whether it matters, and decide how to respond?

In a recent paper published in the INFORMS Journal on Data Science, the research team introduced a new framework called Mutual Information Surprise, designed to help machines identify meaningful surprises in complex environments. The work could help lay the foundation for AI agents, robots, and autonomous systems that can better navigate unexpected situations, avoid costly mistakes, and make more informed decisions when faced with situations they weren’t designed or trained to handle.  

"Traditional automation systems are designed to follow instructions. They do not have a sense of surprise. Machines follow a predetermined recipe and produce the expected result," said Yu Ding, the Anderson-Interface Chair and professor in ISyE, who is leading this project. " Intelligent agents, however, must do more than simply follow instructions. They need to recognize when their current understanding or reasoning process has become inadequate. Humans routinely use surprise for this purpose. An autonomous machine needs an analogous computational capability."

This research concept was jointly worked out by Xiao Liu, the David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor, as well as a former postdoctoral fellow in ISyE, Yinsong Wang, and Ph.D. student Quan Zeng.

While several methods already exist to measure surprise in machines, such as the "Shannon Surprise" and "Bayesian Surprise," the ISyE team saw limitations in both approaches.  

Shannon Surprise tends to focus on the rarity of an event, while Bayesian Surprise focuses on how much a new observation changes a system's beliefs.

To illustrate the limitations of existing surprise measures, Ding pointed to the examples of someone noticing a specific type of car parked nearby or a student who consistently earns top grades but suddenly performs poorly on an exam.

Existing surprise measures don't always flag the right kinds of moments to be surprised, Ding said. To the examples given, the Shannon Surprise would flag the specific car parked nearby, although people typically wouldn’t be surprised by that event. Conversely, people would be surprised by the student performing poorly, but the Bayesian Surprise would not flag it.    

"We introduce this new surprise definition because it measures the gain of knowledge and epistemic progression, thus capturing the right moments when a system should be surprised and ignoring the moments when it shouldn't," Ding added.  

The framework could eventually help systems determine when to continue as planned or when to stop and reassess, whether that's an AI assistant struggling to answer a question, a robot encountering a situation it has never seen before, or an autonomous factory detecting a disruption that could affect production and require human intervention.

Looking ahead, the ISyE research team is exploring potential applications in engineering autonomous systems and is developing a proposal for federally funded programs.  

It was a chance to find community, encounter new ideas, and see a place for themselves in the future of computing.

The Sept. 16-18 conference at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta brought together students, researchers, educators, and industry professionals from across the country to advance diversity in computing.

The College of Computing had a strong presence throughout the conference, with Vivek Sarkar, John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of Computing, delivering welcoming remarks at the opening session and several College faculty, researchers, and leaders participating in panels and other programming.

Unprecedented student demand

The College has funded students to attend Tapia for more than a decade, typically covering attendance for about eight graduate students. However, with Tapia in Atlanta this year, a record number of students sought registration support from the College.

To manage the demand, Associate Dean of Access and Advancement and Regents’ Professor Dana Randall established the GT Computing Tapia Award. She led a small committee that reviewed 54 student applications and selected 17 for conference registration support.

“Of course, we wish that the College could have covered registration for all of the students who applied,” said Randall. “Tapia is an incredible opportunity for students to discover their community as they develop a richer understanding of where a career in computing can take them.” 

The 17 GT Computing Tapia Award winners were joined by eight students from the Online Master of Science in Computer Science program, and about 10 student volunteers, for a GT Computing contingent of approximately 35 students.

Connecting to community

For Abramson, a CS master’s student whose research focuses on inclusion in computing, the conference offered an opportunity to connect her academic interests with a broader community.

“Tapia was especially meaningful to me because much of my research focuses on inclusion in computing and on creating spaces where everyone feels welcome,” Abramson said. “Attending Tapia allowed me to network and to see how others in my field are working toward those goals.”

But most of all, Tapia reinforced Abramson's sense of belonging.

“The biggest lesson I learned from this conference is that there will always be a place for me at Tapia where I can be myself,” she said. “The best way to carry that legacy forward is to create the same space for others in my own community.”

The Tapia experience provided Muniz, a second-year CS major, with an equally personal perspective.

As a Latina student, Muniz said she remembered attending a first-year seminar in which the student panel didn’t include anyone who looked like her. At Tapia, she found a diverse, supportive community focused on helping students succeed.

“Their continued advocacy for diversity in the computing industry was inspiring,” Muniz said, “and they provided me with numerous resources so I can work toward my future.”

Muniz made the most of these resources by participating in resume review sessions and speaking with recruiters. She also drew inspiration from a presentation by Omar Florez, team lead for LatamGPT, a large language model for Latin America.

As a bilingual student assistant, Muniz saw the potential for technology like LatamGPT to help address representation and information gaps for communities that may lack access to college application resources.

Gaddam, a third-year CS major, also appreciated Tapia’s emphasis on diversity in computing.

She found the conference particularly relevant to her academic and professional interests. A session on the Evolution of Software Engineering with AI directly connected to her coursework and internship experience, while a career panel featuring engineers from Meta and Netflix offered insight into career growth for people of color in technology.

“Being in a room where most of the attendees and speakers didn't match the default image of who works in AI reinforced something I already believe,” said Gaddam.

“The industry needs more people who lead with empathy and intuition, not just technical throughput.”

GT Computing at Tapia

The College’s presence extended beyond student attendance. Along with Sarkar’s opening remarks, faculty, researchers, and students also participated in conference programming.

Kamau Bobb, senior director of Georgia Tech’s Constellations Center for Computing Education, co-headlined a session with data scientist and Tapia co-founder Valerie Thomas. The two discussed artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on underrepresented groups, which is the subject of Bobb’s recent book, The Bullwhip’s Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence and America’s Racial Caste System.

Additional programming contributions from the GT Computing community included:

• Reeda Shimaz Huda, a first-year Ph.D. student in human-centered computing, participated in a panel discussion titled Cultivating Tomorrow’s Innovators: The Transformative Power of Undergraduate Research.
• Alex Cabral, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Ka Moamoa Lab at Georgia Tech, and Josiah Hester, an interactive computing associate professor, participated in a Birds of a Feather session titled Impact-Focused Research in Computing: Publishing, Career Paths, and Community-Building Without Losing Your Values.

Since its launch in 2025, SRI has brought together researchers from across campus to advance interdisciplinary space initiatives and create new opportunities for collaboration. In their new roles, Ballantyne and Borowitz will help guide the institute's growth by strengthening both internal research connections and external partnerships across the broader space community.

“David and Mariel bring complementary strengths that will be invaluable as we continue building SRI,” said Jud Ready, executive director of SRI. “David has a deep understanding of the research enterprise at Georgia Tech and a passion for connecting people and ideas across disciplines. Mariel brings extensive experience working across government, industry, and the international space community. Together, they will help us strengthen Georgia Tech's space ecosystem and expand our impact far beyond campus.”

Strengthening Georgia Tech's Research Community

Since joining the Institute in 2008 as a founding faculty member of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, Ballantyne has helped advance both space science and academic leadership across campus.

A professor in the School of Physics, he studies the evolution of galaxies and their central black holes, as well as the physics of accretion disks around black holes and neutron stars. He has authored more than 140 peer-reviewed publications and served as associate chair of the School of Physics for nearly a decade.

As associate director, Ballantyne will focus on cultivating connections across Georgia Tech's space research community and identifying opportunities for new interdisciplinary collaborations.

“I view SRI as a catalyst — a mechanism to spark new and transformative areas of space research at Georgia Tech that will grow to national and international prominence,” Ballantyne said. “There is so much innovative space research happening across campus, and one of SRI's most important roles is helping researchers find the connections and collaborations that can spark new ideas and discoveries.”

Ballantyne says he is particularly interested in helping position Georgia Tech as a leader in understanding the opportunities and challenges presented by artificial intelligence in space systems.

“My goal is to be out in the community, learning about the breadth of space research happening across campus and identifying ways SRI can accelerate that work,” he said. “AI technologies are poised to transform space exploration, scientific discovery, national security, and commercial space operations. SRI is uniquely positioned to help Georgia Tech lead those conversations.”

Building Partnerships Beyond Campus

As space activities become increasingly interconnected across government, industry, and academia, strong partnerships are essential to translating research into real-world impact. That collaborative spirit is central to the work of Mariel Borowitz, an associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.

Borowitz, who also serves as director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Space Policy and International Relations, is widely recognized for her expertise in space policy, international cooperation, and the governance of emerging space activities. Her work has connected her with space agencies, private companies, and policymakers around the world, providing a valuable perspective on opportunities for Georgia Tech to expand its engagement with the broader space community.

In her role as associate director, Borowitz will focus on growing SRI's partnerships with industry, government, and the broader space community.

“My focus as associate director will be on building partnerships between Georgia Tech and the broader space community,” Borowitz said. “Georgia Tech has tremendous expertise across science, engineering, policy, economics, and international affairs. By working across those disciplines, we can help address the complex challenges facing the future of space development while creating new opportunities for collaboration and impact.”

Borowitz sees SRI as a powerful mechanism for connecting Georgia Tech's diverse strengths and amplifying their collective impact.

“Real-world challenges and opportunities are inherently interdisciplinary,” she said. “The Space Research Institute allows us to bring together expertise from across Georgia Tech to develop more complete solutions and create new possibilities for the future of space.”

Looking Ahead

Together, Ballantyne and Borowitz will help advance SRI's mission of connecting researchers, educators, students, industry leaders, and policymakers to address the most pressing opportunities and challenges in space.

“Space exploration has always challenged us to think bigger, work across boundaries, and pursue questions that no single discipline can answer alone,” said Ready, who also serves as a principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. “David and Mariel embody that spirit of collaboration, and their leadership will help us create new opportunities for discovery, innovation, and impact at Georgia Tech and beyond.”
 

Top-tier specialty rankings in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity continue to drive the program's standing, with AI retaining its No. 5 rank nationwide and Cybersecurity holding firm at No. 2.

“Maintaining a top-five national ranking reflects the extraordinary excellence and dedication of our faculty, students, and staff,” said Vivek Sarkar, John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of Computing.

“Our research strength in critical areas such as cybersecurity and AI, together with our distinctive threads-based curriculum, reflects our commitment to a comprehensive education that keeps pace with rapid technological change and prepares our graduates to thrive in a workforce undergoing major transformation.”

The 2027 U.S. News Best Colleges rankings reflect performance across several specialized undergraduate tracks within the College:

• Cybersecurity: No. 2
• Software Engineering: No. 3
• Artificial Intelligence: No. 5
• Data Analytics: No. 5
• Computer Systems: No. 6 (up 1 spot)
• Theory: No. 10
• Programming Languages: No. 13 (down 3 spots)

Building on prior years' gains in national recognition, the latest results mark continued consistency across both foundational theory and specialized subfields.

Earlier this year, U.S. News and World Report ranked Georgia Tech No. 7 overall among the best graduate CS programs.

Upon returning to Georgia Tech, Phute reflected on her summer internship and what it taught her about the evolving relationship between research and industry.

Student: Mansi Phute

Research Interests: Machine learning (ML) robustness and artificial intelligence (AI) safety

Degree Program: Ph.D. in Computer Science

Faculty Advisor: School of CSE Professor and Associate Chair Polo Chau

2026 Internship: International Business Machines (IBM), San Jose, California

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

IBM is often at the forefront of AI safety, my field of interest, and has a culture that encourages exploratory and fundamental research. I felt this would give me a closer look at cutting-edge industry approaches without compromising on my research interests or my progress toward my thesis.

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

My experience at Georgia Tech was very helpful in preparing me for IBM. My coursework and other academic experiences certainly transferred over, but I believe that the wide range of people I met during those courses and what I learned from them helped me connect and relate strongly with people at IBM. Being conversant in different fields of research really helped me interact better with IBM coworkers and feel comfortable in a new environment.

What did you work on while interning at IBM?

I worked on IBM’s AI Foundations team, focusing on the security of multimodal agent communication during my internship. This is an important problem as we see an increase in agents applied in many use cases. It was also closely aligned with my research interests of AI safety.

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

One of my favorite moments was presenting my work to a broad, cross-team audience of technical and non-technical members. Afterward, my manager told me I was good at explaining my research to people with varying levels of familiarity with the domain. This feedback meant a lot to me because communicating clearly across different audiences is a skill I've deliberately worked to improve. So, hearing that the effort was paying off was very rewarding.

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

This internship was very valuable for my development as an aspiring researcher. I worked alongside accomplished people in the AI safety field on projects that aligned closely with my research interests. I also saw how those same projects connect to a company's broader business priorities, a perspective that isn’t easily available in academic settings. I shared many fruitful discussions with people working in safety, policy, and alignment, which gave me a much clearer sense of how industry approaches these issues compared to the more academic-oriented framing I am used to.

Based on what you learned during your internship, how important is private industry in progressing research and scientific discovery?

Working in private industry was a fascinating experience. I come away believing that industry plays an important role in advancing research, especially in AI, where companies have access to computing resources that are less prohibitive than in academic environments. I also think that because private industry has a strong hand in implementing and deploying research, understanding industry priorities can help us frame and design our research in ways that complement industry applications. This ensures research has a bigger impact, particularly in the domain of ML safety and reliability.

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 internship provided Burnett with valuable insight into national laboratory research and reinforced skills he developed through his studies at Georgia Tech. When he returned to campus, we asked Burnett to share more about his internship and what he learned.

Student: Tage Burnett

Research Interests: Fusion energy, computational plasma physics, high-performance computing, and structure-preserving machine learning

Degree Program: Ph.D. in Computational Science and Engineering

Faculty Advisor: School of CSE Assistant Professor Qi Tang

2026 Internship: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Many people are unfamiliar with national laboratories, like ORNL. Could you explain the purpose of these institutions and why they are important?

The Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories are responsible for moving forward science and technology in the United States and solving high-consequence challenges in science, energy, and national security. They work on both applied and theoretical research with both short-term and long-term returns. ORNL has eight core research areas: biology and environment, energy science, fusion and fission, isotopes, physical sciences, national security, neutron science, and supercomputing. I was an intern in the supercomputing division.

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

My coursework at Georgia Tech was vital in my preparation for this internship. I wrote highly parallel code where I leaned heavily on what I learned in CSE 6220: High-Performance Computing. I also worked on numerical methods which required an understanding of partial differential equations and numerical linear algebra which I also learned at Georgia Tech from classes like CSE 6643: Numerical Linear Algebra and a space plasma physics course.

What did you work on while interning at ORNL?

At ORNL, I was a developer on the Adaptive Sparse Grid Discretization (ASGarD) codebase. The code uses adaptive sparse grids and the Discontinuous Galerkin method to beat the curse of dimensionality and solve high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs). The code is designed to simulate fully kinetic plasmas in up to 6-dimensional phase space. My project was to implement an iterative method to solve the efficiently solve the Poisson equation within the codebase. This project gave me hands on experience with linear algebra, numerical PDEs, parallel computing and software engineering which was invaluable to my development as a CSE researcher.

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

My favorite memory from my internship was spending time with the other ORNL interns outside of work. There was an amazing group of interns at ORNL, and it was great getting to know them. One particularly good memory was when we went out to a restaurant with live music and played laser tag during our last week of the internship to celebrate our time at ORNL. The achievement I am most proud of was getting a working, highly efficient version of the Poisson solver into ASGarD. The ASGarD codebase is open source, so I hope other plasma physics researchers will use the code and find it helpful for their research.

While interning, you were selected for a GEM Fellowship, which Georgia Tech and ORNL nominated you for. What does this fellowship mean to you and is there anything you would like to say to your supporters?

To me, receiving the GEM Fellowship indicates that other people recognize the hard work I am doing, and they believe in my ability to meaningfully contribute to the field. Having this support from GEM, ORNL, and Georgia Tech gives me greater confidence in myself and my potential and inspires me to put my all into my work. I would like all my supporters to know that I am so grateful for the opportunity you have given me to be a part of the excellent community of researchers within GEM, ORNL, and Georgia Tech. I will do my very best to make your support worthwhile!

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

The internship was extremely important to both my studies at Georgia Tech and my career as a researcher. The hands-on experience I gained is irreplaceable and it helped me to apply all the skills I have developed throughout my education. I am also optimistic that the internship will open doors for me when I am seeking a job post-graduation.

“It was something I had wanted since I was a kid,” he said. “Growing up in India, it wasn't known for martial arts.”

Agrawal knew he needed something to help him balance his physical health with the challenges of graduate school. He checked the list of classes offered by Georgia Tech’s Campus Recreation. One stood out: Georgia Tech Taido.

Taido is a niche martial art that applies a modern, scientific approach to traditional Okinawan karate. There is only one school in the U.S. that teaches it — Taido Karate in Peachtree Corners, Ga., which is currently the world’s largest taido school.

Taido means “the way of the body and the mind.” It was invented in the 1960s by Seiken Shukumine. 

One of Shukumine’s students, Mitsunobu Uchida, brought the new martial art to the U.S. when he immigrated in 1975. Uchida decided that Atlanta would be an ideal place to open a new school. 

Since then, generations of students have trained at Taido Karate, including Georgia Tech alumnus Bryan Sparks (EE 2000), and Andy Fossett, who started as a student at Tech in 1996 before transferring to Georgia State.

Sparks and Fossett learned taido together as kids. Both became black belts before graduating high school. 

Shortly after becoming students at Tech, they started an official taido club on campus. They taught their first class in 1996, which only had one student. By the next semester, they had almost a dozen. 

“The class was held in an open area, and a lot of people would walk by and see us training,” Sparks said. “That was the best advertisement we could ever have. We’d invite them to work out, and it grew from there. We did some demonstrations around campus in the early days.”

The taido club is still going strong and celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. 

Agrawal discovered it in 2018 as a first-year Ph.D. student. He earned his doctorate in robotics from Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing in 2025.

While keeping his Ph.D. studies first, Agrawal trained for five years to earn a black belt. He said the process was the most physically and mentally challenging he’s ever experienced.

“The tenets of taido teach you how to compose yourself and how to have a good mindset, which becomes helpful in dealing with daily life stress,” Agrawal said. “It helps you focus on what’s important in the moment.”

“There were times when I felt like nothing was going right, and I kept asking ‘What am I even doing?’ But I knew if I could do some of the harder things in taido, there’s no reason I couldn’t do the same thing in my Ph.D.”

Agrawal’s commitment paid off in 2022 when he became one of five students from Tech Taido to pass the black belt test that year.

“The test is grueling,” he said. “It’s four hours long. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done physically, and I’ve run several marathons. They test you on everything you’ve learned from white belt level to brown belt level. I was training five days a week for five months.

“It was one of the best days of my life. It felt like no matter what happened, I could move forward with my life and be proud of that accomplishment.”

Agrawal landed a remote job with a robotics startup after graduating. His new position allowed him to stay in Atlanta and continue with Georgia Tech Taido as an instructor.

He said the unique aspect of taido is its emphasis on community and culture, which can be attributed to Uchida’s influence. 

“A lot of times, American senseis open dojos after learning martial arts overseas. They bring the techniques and the discipline over, but they don’t bring the culture that comes with it. I love how taido is a part of our lives. It’s not a separate workout; it’s a communal thing.”

Agrawal teaches classes with Lacy Hardcastle, who took over as lead instructor when Sparks moved out of the area in 2019. Hardcastle took her first Taido class at Tech in 2007.

Hardcastle said students trying taido for the first time will get a challenging workout.

“I didn’t know how weak my legs were until I took taido,” she said. “It kicked my butt the first semester. We do whole body conditioning with lots of push-ups, lunges, squats and other exercises. It’s a very athletic martial art and requires whole-body fitness and control.”

Hardcastle describes the environment as welcoming and supportive, with regular get-togethers outside of class and a biennial trip to Japan with the Taido Karate school.

“We have a great social community where we support each other,” she said. “We occasionally go out to social events together. Sometimes we’ll get together to watch MMA fights, things like that. But we also work out hard.” 

Georgia Tech Taido classes are held every Monday and Wednesday from 8:30 p.m. to 9:45 p.m. in Studio A of the Georgia Tech Campus Recreation Center. The registration cost for the fall semester is $75. To register, visit https://crc.gatech.edu/martial-arts-4/.

“Every living organism runs on chemistry, and metabolomics is the attempt to read that chemistry directly by measuring thousands of small molecules at once: in a drop of blood, a leaf, a microbial colony, and even a single cell,” Fernández says. 

Advances in understanding metabolites could provide new insights for cancer diagnostics, drug development, and environmental monitoring.

“The Metabolomics Society’s members are pushing the field forward and translating metabolomics knowledge into real health benefits for society,” he adds. “Being selected by that group of scientists and students feels like a special kind of honor.”

Fernández joined Georgia Tech in 2004 and also serves as the Vasser-Woolley Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. His research focuses on developing tools to measure and analyze small-volume samples, tissues, and single cells. He also directs the Systems Mass Spectrometry Core at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. 

His two-year term on the Metabolomics Society's Board of Directors begins Oct. 1. 

Ahmadi and Brown find that neighborhoods with higher shares of Black residents experience higher energy burdens, even after accounting for factors such as income, renter status, and housing characteristics. In this study, energy burden refers mainly to the share of household income spent on electricity, gas, and water. The authors estimate that an approximately 11 percentage-point increase in a neighborhood’s Black population share is associated with about a 1 percentage-point increase in household energy burden, equal to an average annual increase of about $785 in utility costs. These findings suggest that unequal energy burdens are tied not only to household finances, but also to the lasting effects of segregation and discrimination. 

Read Full Story on the EPIcenter Page

When Chevron reported its highest quarterly profit in six years on July 31, 2026, it was just one detail in a larger picture: Analyst firm Wood Mackenzie estimates the global oil and gas industry is on course for a cash windfall of US$495 billion in 2026. That’s profit above and beyond what the industry expected before the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began.

Three separate bills seeking to tax those profits are now in Congress, and President Donald Trump has even said the oil companies are “making too much money.”

As an applied microeconomist, I am often asked how taxes affect economic activity. Economists have long held a more nuanced view of windfall taxes than either side of the current debate suggests. Advocates often make overly optimistic revenue projections, and opponents often overstate how much such a tax might discourage investment. A 1980s U.S. windfall-tax experiment is instructive on both counts.

Read Full Story on The Conversation

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.”

A Georgia Tech research team was recently recognized for an influential paper that helped define how applications could run efficiently outside the cloud.  

But recent research from Georgia Tech’s School of Economics in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts suggests adding an asterisk to earlier research that makes that conclusion, saying previous studies failed to account for one simple fact: people adapt. 

Georgia Tech economist Bobby Harris used a massive database of Fitbit step count data to measure how temperature shapes physical activity and found that extreme heat cuts step counts by 6% when compared to ideal weather. And while residents of the warmest regions cut their activity by an average of only 354 steps on days over 100 degrees, those living in the coldest regions cut theirs by 1,081, according to Harris’ analysis. 

To be fair, cold bites, too. On days that stay below freezing, people take roughly 1,000 fewer steps. That’s a 12% drop, enough to pack on a pound over the course of a typical Madison, Wisconsin winter, Harris found. 

But as the climate grows warmer, how humanity will respond to warmer temperatures remains a significant concern. In fact, earlier research projected that, by 2050, temperature-driven declines in physical activity could contribute to 500,000 premature deaths a year worldwide and annual productivity losses topping $2.4 billion. 

Projections like those typically assume everyone responds to heat the same way, with no capacity to adapt, Harris said.  

Read Full Story on the IAC News Page
 

It began with a focus on helping computer systems incorporate human language into their perception of the world. Could a robot tell humans that a heavy object is straining its arm? Does it know that a container makes a sound when it is picked up or dropped?

Now, Thomason’s research has become more human-centered, which is one reason he feels at home as he joins the faculty at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing as an associate professor.

Thomason comes to Georgia Tech after spending five years as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science.

He will move his Grounding Language in Actions, Multimodal Observation, and Robots (GLAMOR) lab to Tech. The lab explores methods for connecting natural language processing to robotics.

While pursuing his computer science Ph.D. at the University of Texas, Thomason researched early NLP systems before large-language models such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini were introduced.

Thomason then expanded into robotics to explore how roboticists can create new ways to communicate with robots using computational representations of language.

“The idea was you could do something that looked like robot programming without as much engineering work if you used one of these coding modules to create a language-code interface,” Thomason said. 

When OpenAI and Google released their commercial LLMs in 2022, Thomason felt a seismic shift.

“That area of NLP and robotics became more crowded and accessible with the advent of (LLMs),” Thomason said. “It created a huge inroad to roboticists being able to plug and play language technologies in a way they couldn’t before. Robotics hardware has also become much cheaper and more standardized.”

But as LLMs became universal tools accessible to everyone, Thomason said he started thinking more about how he could improve optimization for users.

“I became most interested in how language interfaces, starting in 2022, were suddenly everywhere,” he said. “Everybody had a chatbot on their phone. I wanted to see what we could do as researchers to make the interaction between an AI system like a language model and a person smoother and more beneficial.”

Thomason said he felt he needed a new environment where end users were at the center of the technology design process. He was drawn to the School of Interactive Computing for its reputation in human-computer interaction research.

“That was a big factor in my decision to move to the School of Interactive Computing, where you value that kind of human-centered computing,” he said. 

“With the strong HCI researchers here, I have an opportunity to learn more from my colleagues about how to run high-quality human-subject studies, conduct participatory design, and identify actual users of a potential system and talk to them about what would be helpful.”

Georgia Tech researchers spent two years helping to answer that question through DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), a competition designed to test whether AI could identify and fix security vulnerabilities in real-world software.

Now, they are sharing what they learned with the cybersecurity community.

Their paper, SoK: DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC): Competition Design, Architectures, and Lessons Learned, was presented at USENIX Security 2026, one of the world's leading cybersecurity conferences. The paper was selected as a runner-up for the conference’s distinguished paper award, placing it among 36 recognized papers from 362 accepted papers out of 3,028 submissions.

The paper examines how the seven finalist teams approached the competition and what the results reveal about the future of AI-powered cybersecurity.

Putting AI to the Test

AIxCC challenged teams to build Cyber Reasoning Systems (CRSs) that could operate with minimal human assistance to identify software vulnerabilities, develop fixes, and determine whether security alerts were real threats.

The teams had 143 hours to analyze 53 software projects during the final competition.

Georgia Tech’s Team Atlanta, which won the competition, used an approach that combined multiple AI agents with traditional security tools. Other teams used different approaches, including applying AI for specific tasks or building highly autonomous AI agents.

The variety of systems provided researchers with a rare opportunity to compare different approaches to AI-powered cybersecurity.

Lesson from the Competition

One of the biggest lessons was that reliability matters as much as intelligence.

Some systems were highly capable but struggled to remain operational while analyzing large, complicated software projects. The strongest systems were often those that could work reliably throughout the competition.

The researchers also found that AI and traditional security tools have different strengths. Traditional tools were still effective at finding common bugs, while AI performed better at reasoning through more complex problems.

However, AI-generated fixes remain a major challenge.

Researchers found that 38% to 46% of AI-generated patches were semantically incorrect. This means a patch might stop a security problem but also break a feature or create another problem.

The results show that AI can play an important role in cybersecurity, but human experts are still needed to verify the safety of AI-generated fixes.

Sharing the Lessons

Cen Zhang, the paper’s first author, said the research offers a unique look at the competition by combining lessons from the finalist teams, organizers, and DARPA’s data.

“This paper provides a unique angle on how AIxCC was designed, the techniques teams used, and what the scores reveal and conceal,” Zhang said.

Jiho Kim presented the paper at USENIX Security 2026. He said the presentation was an opportunity to share lessons from two years of work with the broader cybersecurity community.

“Seeing the strong interest and thoughtful questions from the audience made the experience particularly rewarding,” Kim said.

The researchers say they hope the lessons from AIxCC will help guide the next generation of cybersecurity tools.

The new fellowship award was announced in 2023 and named after Isbell, who served as dean for the Georgia Tech College of Computing from 2019 to 2023. 

Isbell joined Georgia Tech as a faculty member in 2002. He was instrumental in developing the College’s innovative Threads curriculum and the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program.

The new fellowship is given to graduate students from underrepresented groups.

Francis is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in human-centered computing (HCC) working toward the improvement of black women’s maternal health. She is advised by Associate Professor Andrea Parker.

“I’m humbled and grateful that my body of work was compelling enough to be awarded,” Francis said. “Receiving this fellowship in Dr. Isbell’s name is encouraging, and I want to do my best work in my last semester to honor his legacy.

“This fellowship secures funding to complete my Ph.D. and continue equity-centered work and champion voices of marginalized or under-resourced populations. This fellowship is directly making this work possible.”

Francis’s work drew attention early in her Ph.D. when she started assisting Parker in the Preventing Maternal Mortality Using Mobile Technology (PM3) study led by the Morehouse School of Medicine’s Center for Maternal Health Equity.

The project aimed toward designing an app that reduces maternal mortality among Black postpartum women by getting them care on their phones. The app featured real-time health monitoring, educational resources, social support groups, and personalized care.

Google recognized Francis’s work through its Fitbit Health Equity Research initiative in 2021.

Francis entered the HCC Ph.D. program with a background in public health. She holds a bachelor’s degree in public health education and promotion from Georgia Southern University and master’s degrees in public health and biotechnology from Morehouse.

“I felt overwhelmed at first because I thought I had made the wrong choice pursuing a computing Ph.D. coming from a public health background,” she said. “After steeping myself in the literature and applying myself, I found that I can be a leader and innovator in this space.”

Francis said the fellowship will allow her to continue her research in clinical artificial intelligence (AI) for black women’s health.

Student Enters Ph.D. Program as Stamps Fellow

As Francis gets set for her final semester, Rachel Baker-Ramos is beginning the first semester of her Ph.D. as a recipient of the Stamps Fellowship.

Baker-Ramos is part of the second cohort of the Stamps Fellows, which was implemented by Georgia Tech in 2025. The Stamps Fellowship is the highest merit-based doctoral fellowship offered by Georgia Tech and given to exceptional scholars positioned to advance technology that improves the human condition.

She is the second student from the School of Interactive Computing to be named a Stamps Fellow. Adya Danaditya was a member of the first cohort last year. 

Baker-Ramos completed her master’s in human-computer interaction in 2024 under Georgia Tech’s MSHCI program. 

She spent two years as a research scientist in the Ka Moamoa Lab, led by SIC associate professor Josiah Hester. In 2025, she received the College of Computing’s Outstanding Research Scientist Award. 

She will continue her Ph.D. research with Hester as her advisor.

Baker-Ramos has assisted Hester, a native Hawaiian, on several Hawaii-based projects centered on sustainability and indigenous STEM education.

As a master’s student, Baker-Ramos led the design of Kumu Connect, a STEM lesson plan generator that creates culturally relevant lessons co-designed with Hawaiian immersion language teachers.

Hester and his lab received a Google Academic Research Award for their work on Kumu Connect and recognition from the 2025 MIT Solve Indigenous Communities Fellowship. Baker-Ramos was also first author on a paper about the project that earned best paper honorable mention recognition at the ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference.

“When I first came to Tech, I was seeking out something with the Hispanic community because we are underrepresented in STEM, but it became this partnership with my advisor,” Baker-Ramos said. “It’s been interesting as a researcher from an underrepresented community working with another community that has some experiences that are parallel and some that are different.”

As she thinks about what her Ph.D. research will look like, she is interested in how AI is impacting indigenous cultures. She plans to start research in that area in Hawaii and then expand to other communities.

“We’re talking with Hawaiian educators about what AI should look like if it were grounded in principles of caring for the land,” she said. “I want to look at what’s appropriate with these tools, and what should be their limitations with data sovereignty, community agency, sustainable impacts, and how they’re localized to each community. 

“Right now, my work is mostly in Hawaiian spaces, but there’s a lot of nuance between different communities. We need to understand what each community wants or doesn’t want out of these systems.”

However, new artificial intelligence (AI) models developed at Georgia Tech may soon weigh in on the debate, providing a richer, more accurate understanding of what classical structures looked like than ever before.

The new AI and machine learning models developed by GT researchers will provide archaeologists and classical architecture experts with better analytical tools for studying temples, theaters, homes, and other structures from ancient Greece.

These models could enable researchers to draw conclusions and make new discoveries in a fraction of the time required to identify and analyze archaeological data using traditional statistical methods.

Kartik Goyal and Myrsini Mamoli received a $225,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities earlier this year to support interdisciplinary collaboration, including the development of the models. 

Goyal is an assistant professor in Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. He researches how natural language processing can benefit humanities scholars, including analyzing historical texts to make new discoveries.

Mamoli, a native of Greece, is an architectural historian and joint lecturer in the School of Architecture and School of History and Sociology . She conducted early research on how computational methods can help reconstruct historical architectural remains while earning her Ph.D. in architecture from Tech.

Mamoli is one of hundreds of researchers who spend their summers each year studying archaeological sites and monuments in Greece or Italy. She is among a select few working at the Ancient Agora in Athens.

“The Agora is where the political buildings of Athens emerged, and democracy was born, so it’s one of the most important sites in the classical world,” said Mamoli.

“Having been excavated by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens for almost 100 years, it’s the most well-funded, systematically explored, and most digitally well-documented site.”

More than 180,000 artifacts have been uncovered at the Ancient Agora.

The physical structures that have survived for thousands of years, along with recorded data and references in ancient texts, are the primary sources scholars rely on to determine what buildings might have looked like in antiquity.

Mamoli said identifying and studying all comparable structures and formulating hypotheses about them takes years. Every discovery made at the Agora since 1933 has a digitized record, leaving a massive amount of data to sort through.

AI can comb through it in a matter of moments and help researchers fill the gaps.

“Anything I want to look at, I can access it online, but the process of going through and connecting the dots and identifying certain design principles like proportions and material is tedious. Imagine if we could feed this data into an AI model that would automatically discover the connections.”

Mamoli said architecture has its own “language” that can be analyzed as a shape grammar. This visual, rule-based mathematical concept is used to generate designs in that language. Each architectural style has its own shape grammar.

Mamoli’s work as a Ph.D. student involved manually computing this information to generate 2D visualizations. Now, she hopes Goyal’s models will enable the instant conversion of data into more subjective and accurate visualizations.

“You encode these design principles and then apply them recursively, and you come up with various possible reconstructions,” she said. “Making these rules is time-consuming, so we hope with AI, a whole fresh approach can happen where AI can discover the rules by looking at the data at scale.”

Goyal has already used similar methods to analyze early modern English printed books and identify their printing origins. When Mamoli approached him about collaborating with her, he believed the same process could be applied to reconstructing classical buildings.

“Ancient texts and historical architecture records can help us fill in the blanks,” Goyal said. 

“These systems can automatically infer patterns from the fragmentary plans described in various texts. To automatically generate a proposed reconstruction, we are deploying machine learning techniques. They make the model not just think about producing tokens or pixels, but also about the aesthetic and geometric features.”

Goyal said he’s aware some humanities scholars have expressed concern that AI could compromise scholarly integrity. Large-language models, for example, can struggle to account for cultural nuances and often inject biased hallucinations into their output.

“This is reflected in many problems in the humanities that I’m working on — the need for AI systems to be more transparent and more easily modifiable,” he said. “If we run these models blindly, we risk incorporating undetected bias.”

Mamoli said it’s important to limit the scope of AI and think of it as a tool. 

“I strongly believe that AI should not replace the human brain,” she said. “I don’t see it replacing the scholarly work that is being done. I see it as assisting it.

For archaeologists, it may be necessary.

With so many sites being excavated, it could be the best way to keep track of hundreds of thousands of artifacts and use them to gain a clearer historical understanding. 

“Right now, I am working in the Section Iota in the Agora of Athens,” said Mamoli.

“This is a disturbed site with artifacts from all over the Agora because people have moved them for secondary uses. What if an AI model could instantly create a map to trace that movement and show exactly where these fragments came from?”

The committee, convened through the National Academies' project Future of Battery Technology Options for Defense Applications, will identify the strengths and weaknesses of future battery technologies, including an examination of performance, safety, and manufacturability across technology and manufacturing readiness levels. The committee will also identify gaps where research investments could potentially improve battery capabilities across technology and manufacturing readiness levels, creating opportunities to leverage commercially available technologies.

With a joint appointment in MSE and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, McDowell is internationally recognized for his research on batteries and energy storage materials. His work focuses on understanding how materials change during battery operation and using that knowledge to develop safer, more efficient, and more sustainable energy storage systems. McDowell is also co-director of the Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center. He leads research spanning solid-state batteries, lithium-ion and sodium-ion technologies, and next-generation energy storage materials. “I am very thankful to be selected, and I look forward to working with colleagues on developing recommendations to advance battery technologies in support of our country," said McDowell.

Read Full Story on the MSE Newspage

This award is part of NASA’s Space Technology Research Grants Program, which supports groundbreaking projects with the potential to transform space science and technology.

Through the three-year, $750,000 award, Mazumdar and her research team will develop laser-based methods to simultaneously measure temperature, chemical species, gas velocity, and other properties in the gases surrounding heat shield materials.

“We aim to implement our measurement techniques in arc jet or plasma jet facilities, like the ones at NASA, to assist with the evaluation of thermal protection systems for next-generation spacecraft,” Mazumdar said.

The project uses ultrafast lasers, which produce extremely short, high-intensity pulses. These pulses allow researchers to study the behavior of molecules on extremely short timescales and measure properties that can improve understanding of the gases surrounding a spacecraft during atmospheric entry.

Mazumdar said she and her students are excited about this project and hope it will help NASA develop new heat shields for spacecraft traveling to destinations such as Mars, Venus, and Titan.

Read Full Story on the ME Webpage

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College of Computing alumna Nova Ahmed (CS Ph.D. 2010) will return to campus on Sept. 14 to discuss her two decades of experience applying technology to address social and humanitarian challenges. 

A new study led by Francesca Storici, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and faculty member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, has uncovered an unexpected feature of human DNA linked to gene activity and the physical organization of DNA. The findings, published in Cell, could change how scientists think about DNA organization, transcription, and genome function. 

The award is the NSF’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty and supports researchers with the potential to serve as academic role models and to lead advances in their department or organization.  

"Receiving the NSF CAREER Award is a tremendous honor and an opportunity to advance my long-term research agenda,” Saeed said. “It was only made possible by the creativity and dedication of my students and the unwavering support and guidance of my family and mentors.” 

Modern data center servers manage resource allocation and load distribution separately, which can result in conflicting decisions. A key idea behind Saeed’s proposal is to develop an integrated view of these operations to improve efficiency without requiring additional hardware. 

“When performing operations jointly, you can maximize performance and completely eliminate the chances of conflict,” Saeed said.  

Another driver of the project is what Saeed calls the “single queue fallacy.” This occurs when data center load controllers assume that all incoming requests to a server wait in a single queue to be processed. 

In reality, servers are much more complex than this and can handle multiple queues at the same time. Modern workloads have heterogeneous load requirements, meaning that different requests end up landing in different queues. 

“This single queue fallacy can lead to severe underutilization of these servers,” he said.  

Recent research by Saeed shows that a server’s throughput can be doubled by avoiding the single-queue fallacy.  

The potential benefits of this project are wide-ranging and impactful. Maximizing server efficiency would reduce costs and energy use. With fewer resources needed, the project could contribute to more sustainable computing infrastructure. Lower operational costs would benefit companies, application developers, and users. 

“The goal of my proposal is to develop mechanisms and policies that can allow data center operators to easily maximize the utilization of all hardware,” he said.  

As part of the educational component of his proposal, Saeed plans to organize competitions for students to design more efficient load and resource management algorithms using artificial intelligence.  

In addition to this award, Saeed was named a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Faculty Fellow last fall to support his goal of making data centers more sustainable.  

Georgia Tech is hosting the 2026 MFEM (Modular Finite Element Methods) Community Workshop, Sept. 22-25. MFEM supports research in computational physics, earth systems modeling, engineering, energy, and other fields. 

The four-day workshop is being held at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center and will focus on improving software for scientific computing and discovery. Participants can also attend online. Registration for the workshop is open through Sept. 11. 

“We're very excited and grateful for the opportunity to have this workshop at Georgia Tech,” said Tzanio Kolev, a computational mathematician at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

“Georgia Tech has a great reputation in our field, and hosting at universities is a great way to connect with students. We see students as our future colleagues who will improve MFEM for generations to come.”

MFEM is an open-source software library for solving equations in computational models. Scientists and engineers use it to build and test virtual designs on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers before creating real-world prototypes.

In fact, MFEM powered a tsunami early-warning model that ran on El Capitan, the world’s second-fastest supercomputer. The framework completed a simulation in a fraction of a second, 10 billion times faster than conventional algorithms. Kolev was part of the team that won the 2025 Gordon Bell Prize for the project.

MFEM’s impact extends beyond its original developers. The AWS Center for Quantum Computing uses the software as the foundation for a tool called Palace. This project runs 3D electromagnetic simulations to aid in the design of quantum computing hardware.

“These workshops have been very beneficial for both the broader user community and also for MFEM developers,” said Kolev.

“Every workshop, we are surprised by the ways people are building on our work, seeing what incredible, interesting, amazing things they do with it.”

Next month’s workshop at Georgia Tech will connect MFEM users and developers from national laboratories, academia, government, and industry. 

The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority joins LLNL and Georgia Tech in sponsoring this year’s workshop. Nearly 20 scientists from Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories are attending in person. They represent LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and the Naval Nuclear Laboratory.

The workshop’s first day features a free, hybrid tutorial. LLNL’s High Performance Computing Innovation Center will lead the tutorial, helping new users get started with MFEM and learn what the software can do. The tutorial requires separate registration for virtual participants.

The workshop will also host a simulation and visualization contest. Participants can submit images and videos of simulations using MFEM, which will be posted in a gallery. The workshop organizers will select an overall winner.

Further workshop activities include:

• MFEM news and roadmap for future projects
• Talks from application developers
• Student-user lightning talks
• In-person poster sessions
• Office hours with MFEM experts

The MFEM workshop highlights the role open-source software plays in scientific discovery. 

By making tools freely available, researchers can build on each other’s work rather than starting from scratch. This shared approach can accelerate innovation, improve software, and make advanced computing tools accessible to a wider community.

Georgia Tech hosts a Center for Scientific Software Engineering and an Open-Source Program Office. This year’s workshop connects these units with the MFEM community to help put the software into the hands of more researchers across science and engineering.

“The MFEM workshop aims to foster collaboration among all MFEM users and developers,” said Qi Tang, a workshop organizer and assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering.

“Hosting its annual community workshop brings researchers from DOE laboratories, universities, and industry to campus, giving Georgia Tech faculty and students direct access to experts from the field.”

In time for the fall semester, the ribbon has been cut, and students will soon move into Georgia Tech’s newest traditional residence hall — the Bud and Val Peterson Residence Hall.  

“The future of computing extends far beyond the tech industry alone, and every sector increasingly relies on computational thinking and digital tools,” Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Olufisayo Omojokun said. 

“Students who double major embody that vision by combining technical skills with expertise in another field. That combination prepares them to solve real-world problems in innovative ways.”

While the national average for double majoring across all undergraduate disciplines sits at roughly 11%, Tech students are charting their own distinct paths. Among recent computer science graduates, 17.5% (596 students) successfully completed at least one minor, and 3.8% (131 students) graduated with a full double major.

“Overall, interdisciplinary interest is high, especially in areas like math, robotics, and economics,” said Bethany Mason, director of computing enrollment.

A Snapshot of Interdisciplinary Paths

While mathematics remains the most common pairing, computing students combine their studies with other fields in a wide range of ways. These combinations reflect individual interests and career goals, shaping how students translate technical skills into different professional contexts.

The top double majors among recent College of Computing graduates are mathematics, applied languages and intercultural studies, and industrial engineering.

Other recent graduates have minored, with Fintech, Mathematics, and Computing and Business being the top choices. 

Students pursue degree combinations for a variety of reasons. Elliot Huang (CS and Psychology, 2026), for example, added psychology after becoming interested in how people think. He now applies both fields in computational cognitive neuroscience research.

For Hunter Richardson (CS and Business Administration, 2026), the connection between computing, accounting, and data systems made business a natural complement to his CS studies. He said the combination also helped him during recruiting and will inform his work in Tech Assurance at KPMG.

Oliver Lee (CS and Electrical Engineering, 2025) was drawn to electrical engineering after developing an interest in embedded systems, computer vision, and physical devices. His CS background now gives him a software foundation to apply to hardware and engineering projects.

For Aaron Huang (CS and Biochemistry, Spring 2027), the path to a second major was influenced in part by his parents, both physicians. He has since combined his interests through research in medical labs, where computational methods are increasingly central to the life sciences.

Looking Ahead

The success of these students highlights a clear mandate for the College of Computing: to support and expand these impactful pathways even further.

“Our role is to support those pathways with curricula and advising that make it feasible for students to meaningfully integrate rigorous computing preparation with study across other fields, so they graduate prepared for a wide range of careers and graduate programs,” Omojokun said.

Moving forward, the College is actively exploring how to broaden and formalize more of these interdisciplinary tracks. 

“We don't want students to just manually piece together a double major; we want to build structured frameworks that seamlessly blend disciplines from day one,” Omojokun said.

“We’ve already proven it can be done. For years, the immense student demand for combining mathematics and computer science led directly to the creation of our formal, joint mathematics and computing major.” 

Looking to the future, the College will use that successful blueprint to design even more formalized joint degrees, helping the next generation of Yellow Jackets change the world through the exponential power of computing.

SIGGRAPH, however, gave him another reason to return for its 2026 conference in Los Angeles.

Foley accepted the organization’s Distinguished Educator Award, presented annually since 2019. 

“I guess it wasn’t my last one after all,” Foley said. 

The award recognizes SIGGRAPH members who have made impactful contributions to computer graphics in educational environments. Foley has a strong pedigree in this area.

He co-authored the 1982 textbook Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics, which was renamed in its second edition as Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice. With over 1,100 pages, it is widely regarded as the foundational text of modern computer graphics and animation.

“Some people called it ‘the bible’ of computer graphics, though I think there were some other good graphics textbooks,” Foley said. “We covered many different aspects of computer graphics, from hardware to algorithms to software systems to user interface and design.

“It stands out as an all-encompassing textbook, whereas current books are targeted at specific aspects of computer graphics rather than a broad introduction.”

Foley co-authored the first edition with Andries Van Dam, a professor who co-founded Brown University’s Department of Computer Science. Van Dam was the first to receive the Distinguished Educator Award in 2019.

“I had people thanking me for the book while I was at the conference and telling me it was the first book they learned computer graphics from,” Foley said. 

Foley came to Georgia Tech in 1991 and founded the Graphics, Visualization, & Usability (GVU) Center, which merged with Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) in 2023. GVU faculty helped establish Georgia Tech’s prestigious reputation in computer graphics, and GVU students became highly sought after by video game and film animation studios, including Disney and Pixar.

Foley and other GVU faculty were also at the forefront of the emerging field of human-computer interaction (HCI).

Foley said he enjoyed teaching in the classroom as much as anything and preferred practical approaches.

“I was always big on learning by doing, so I always had projects in my class that made students apply what I was talking about and not just regurgitate stuff on exams,” he said. “I think students enjoy having that hands-on experience.”

However, teaching was something he had to learn.

“I wasn’t good at it at first, but I think writing the book helped with that,” he said. “When you write a book, you discover how much you don’t know about something because you’re trying to carefully explain it so other people can understand.

“It makes you do more thinking, work through the explanations so that it makes sense to you and the reader.”

Georgia Tech established the James D. Foley Endowment in 2007 to honor his achievements. Since then, annual fellowships in his name have been awarded to outstanding graduate students. 

The 2026 Foley Scholar Awards will be announced in November. 

Now, as Professor Edmond Chow prepares to teach at Georgia Tech-Europe for the 2026-2027 academic year, Professor Polo Chau is stepping into the role of associate chair to help guide the School’s next phase of growth. 

Their leadership transition comes at a time when demand for expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), data science and analytics, and high-performance computing accelerates across industry, government, and academia.

“On behalf of the students, faculty, and staff of CSE, I extend our heartfelt gratitude to Edmond for his years of dedicated service as associate chair,” said School of CSE Regents’ Professor and Chair Haesun Park.

“Polo is a respected leader, an accomplished scholar, and a passionate advocate for our community. I am confident he will build on Edmond’s strong foundation to guide the School's continued success.”

The School of CSE associate chair helps lead faculty development, academic planning, and new initiatives. These responsibilities include course scheduling, teaching assignments, and reviewing proposals for new courses.

Rapid growth defined Chow’s tenure as associate chair, which started in summer 2021. 

As associate chair, Chow led CSE’s faculty recruiting committee. The School hired 15 new professors during his term, doubling the faculty in that span.

Chow’s relationship with new hires didn’t end with recruiting. Each new professor needed support to onboard smoothly, which he helped facilitate by pairing new hires with faculty mentors in the School. 

Chow helped new and veteran faculty alike design courses centered on their expertise and the field's emerging needs. As a result, he broadened and enriched the CSE curriculum at Georgia Tech. 

Chow led CSE’s effort to secure space in the Coda Building to accommodate so many new faculty and students. With his help, the School added the east wing of the 13th floor and space for four labs on the fifth floor.

While at Georgia Tech-Europe, Chow will teach CS 7545: Machine Learning Theory and CS 1371: Computing for Engineers. 

Chow is a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Like CSE, the professional society recognized Chow’s leadership and administrative talents, selecting him for several roles.

With his associate chair responsibilities concluded, Chow will focus more on his role as SIAM’s vice president for programs. He also co-chairs the organizing committee for the SIAM Conference on CSE, to be held Feb. 22-26, 2027, in Pittsburgh.

Previously, Chow served as vice chair of the SIAM Activity Group on CSE from 2025 to 2026. He co-chaired the organizing committee for SIAM’s 2022 annual meeting. 

"It has been an honor to serve CSE,” Chow said. “I am also inspired to have worked alongside others, including Haesun, who care so much for the School.”

Since joining Georgia Tech in 2012, Chau has distinguished himself as a leading expert in data science and AI.

Chau’s research combines machine learning and visualization to create scalable, interactive tools. His lab has developed applications for studying massive datasets, interpreting complex AI models, and solving real-world problems in cybersecurity, human-centered AI, graph visualization and mining, and social good.

Chau has taught CSE 4242/6242: Data and Visual Analytics since 2013. The course has grown into the world's largest semester-long university class on the subject. More than 19,600 students have taken the course throughout its history.

Alongside his research and teaching, Chau has held several leadership roles at Georgia Tech.

Since 2014, Chau has served as associate director of Georgia Tech’s M.S. Analytics program. The program celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2024, when he received the Innovator Award for his leadership and pioneering approaches to analytics education.

In 2019, Chau accepted roles as director of industry relations for the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) and as associate director of corporate relations for the Machine Learning Center (ML@GT). Chau recently stepped down from his leadership positions with IDEaS and ML@GT to accommodate his responsibilities as CSE’s associate chair.

“I enjoy building deep connections with people, and this role provides a lot of opportunities to do that,” Chau said. “Faculty development helps my colleagues build the careers that they want, and collectively shape CSE’s future. That’s what I look forward to the most.”

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will pay $17.1 billion and implement new protections to reduce the harmful effects of social media on young people, settling a lawsuit alleging that the social media giant violated consumer protection laws and targeted teenagers through its addictive features.  

Karamcheti said there are times when he doesn’t see any humans at all. Those instances reinforce the perception that robots are replacing humans rather than assisting them.

“You have humanoid robots doing things like folding laundry, and you see videos of it on social media,” Karamcheti said. “It bothers me that in all these videos, I see the robot doing these tasks alone without a single person around them. True human-robot collaboration is missing.”

As he joins the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing as an assistant professor, Karamcheti seeks to improve human-robot collaboration and maximize output through his research. 

Karamcheti comes to Tech after earning his Ph.D. in computer science (CS) from Stanford University. He also holds bachelor’s degrees in CS and literary arts from Brown University. 

In addition to human-robot interaction, he has conducted research on fine-tuning vision-language-action (VLA) models. 

VLAs are artificial intelligence (AI) systems typically built by fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) or large language models (LLMs). They use visual perception, natural language, and physical action to perform tasks.

“I have a high-level vision of what I think robotics should be, but there are many winding paths I like to take along the way as I try to understand why something works the way it does,” Karamcheti said.

Karamcheti said his vision was inspired by the movie Iron Man and by how the main character, Tony Stark, interacts with robots in his lab.

“I don’t want a robot that replaces all the work I’m doing in my life,” he said. “I want a robot that’s embedded in my life like my laptop or smartphone.

“They’re making it possible for me to do more things. I also want to make it so that robots start doing more and learning more when I leave the room.”

Karamcheti said the School of IC is a “dream” job for him because of its renowned faculty in human-robot interaction. It’s the ideal place to keep humans at the center of his research.

“We must design models around interaction and the idea that there’s going to be a person in the room. Robots don’t need to be perfect at any one thing. They just need to be able to ask for help when it’s needed and learn from those teaching interactions.”

Karamecheti said many robotics researchers are pursuing robots that are as close to perfect as possible so they can operate without human oversight. However, the amount of money and data needed to get there is substantial.

“I think you see diminishing returns with scale. If a robot performs tasks correctly 90% of the time, the data required to go from 90% to 95% is much less than that required to go from 95% to 99%. Many robotics companies and labs are investing to reach a 99% success rate,” he said.

Karamcheti added that the pursuit of perfection shouldn’t prevent a robot from being deployed. They could be deployed at 95% and increase their success rate by working with and learning from humans.

“Once I have a robot that’s 95% capable, I understand that 5% of failures will occur for a specific task. If I know a human is always going to be near the robot, I can design a system that sequences tasks and anticipates human intervention.”

Karamcheti is recruiting students to join his lab who bring new perspectives to robotics.

“I’m looking for students who aren’t afraid to challenge common assumptions and who enjoy hacking and building,” he said. “I want to work with students who have strong opinions about how robotics should look.”

Georgia Tech’s Itamar Kolvin is aiming to solve that problem using molecular motors powered by tiny chemical reactions, giving researchers a new way to guide how fibers assemble into larger structures in the lab. The work could open the door to advances in wound healing, artificial tissues, and organ repair.

Now, Kolvin, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, has been awarded a $747,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support this research.

The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program is a five-year grant designed to help promising researchers establish a foundation for a lifetime of leadership in their field. Known as CAREER awards, the grants are NSF’s most prestigious funding for early-career faculty.

“The CAREER award is a crucial opportunity to push this research forward,” says Kolvin. “NSF plays a critical role in advancing science, and we wouldn’t be able to do our work without their support. I’m incredibly grateful for their commitment to advancing science.”

Microscopic Motorboats

While the body naturally assembles these fibers, their small size makes protein filaments difficult to control in a lab setting. Without guidance, the materials grow randomly, creating weak and disorganized structures. But Kolvin has found that exposing the filaments to controlled fluid flows can help them grow in predictable ways.

That’s where Kolvin’s molecular motors come in. He attaches the motors to rod-shaped particles called microtubules, transforming the otherwise inert particles into microscopic motorboats. Powered by chemical reactions, the microtubules move through the fluid and generate tiny currents. Those currents guide the suspended protein filaments, directing how they align and assemble.

Like sticks in a stream, the current helps the protein filaments align with the flow around them. When millions of filaments interact in this way, they can form bundles, clusters, and large-scale networks. 

“How do these rods align, when do they tangle, and when do they form networks?” Kolvin asks. “I’m interested in learning how we may be able to predict and ultimately control that behavior in order to direct the ways these structures can grow.”

Flexible Filaments

Kolvin’s earlier work has already shown success with actin, the filaments responsible for building muscles. When suspended in fluid, the molecular motors helped actin fibers bundle together and form a membrane-like structure. 

While that work demonstrated that molecular motors could influence assembly, Kolvin now aims to create a more dynamic, tunable system. Actin is limited, he explains, because of its simple rod-like shape, lack of rigidity, and because its bonds become permanent once the fibers bundle together.

He believes the more rigid, helix-shaped flagella in this new work will offer a wider range of opportunities. “The shape and rigidity of flagella expand the variety of patterns they can form,” he explains. “These new structures could have different applications.”

Toward Tunable Materials

Through molecular engineering, the Kolvin Lab creates flagella that are temperature-sensitive, meaning that they can make and unmake bonds at different temperatures. This property might be key in creating a system that could be assembled and disassembled on demand.

“This could make it possible to tune materials in real-time by warming or cooling the system," Kolvin explains.

By combining molecular motors with temperature-sensitive protein fibers, Kolvin aims to create systems that can be predictably shaped, assembled, and disassembled on demand, opening the door to new possibilities for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. 

The work could also help answer long-standing problems in physics about active matter and collective behavior, revealing how flow and shape influence the way millions of microscopic building blocks align, pack, and assemble into complex materials.

“This CAREER award provides an exciting opportunity to pursue new ideas and tackle difficult, far-reaching questions,” Kolvin says. “I’m looking forward to seeing where this research leads in the years ahead.”

Speare plans to use the funding to build on her lab’s previous finding that naturally occurring predatory bacteria can reduce disease severity in threatened staghorn corals by defending them against harmful bacteria. Her new research will move beyond direct predator-prey interactions to better understand how bacterial predators influence the broader microbial communities living on corals.

“We know bacterial predators can alter disease outcomes in corals,” explains Speare. “What we don’t yet comprehend is what predation actually does to a complex microbiome inside a living animal. Does a predator simply remove particular bacteria, or can those interactions ripple through the entire microbiome and ultimately affect the host?”

Understanding those changes could reveal why some corals are better able to resist disease and recover from environmental stress than others.

Next Steps

Speare and researchers from the Speare Marine Microbial Ecology Lab will investigate microbial predation outside the laboratory in a whole-community context.

“Most of what we know about microbial interactions comes from studying one or two populations in a test tube,” says Speare. “But microbes can behave very differently in a living host. We want to understand those interactions where they are actually happening.”

Her research will use staghorn corals as a model for observing these interactions over time. Because corals are made up of colonies of genetically identical animal polyps, scientists can repeatedly sample the same colony and track how its microbial communities change. This approach offers a unique window into how microbiomes evolve within an animal host, something that is much more difficult to study  in many other animals used in research

"One of the really powerful things about corals as a model is that we can repeatedly observe what is happening within the same host," says Speare. "Instead of taking a single snapshot of a microbiome, we can follow how interactions unfold through time and explore how those changes ultimately affect the animal."

Speare hopes the research will uncover how bacteria interact within coral microbiomes and whether those interactions can help corals stay healthy and resist disease. 

“It’s unusual to have a model system where fundamental questions about microbial ecology can have such immediate relevance to conservation,” says Speare. “If we learn something that can improve coral health or restoration efforts, we can communicate those findings directly to the practitioners who are actively working to restore these populations.”

Seed Grant Support

Speare credits two prior grants for providing preliminary data for the MIRA award. A NOAA Ruth D. Gates Coral Restoration Innovation Grant helped her develop disease models and investigate the potential health applications of predatory bacteria in corals. A Georgia Tech Sustainability Next Seed Grant filled a critical knowledge gap in the research by testing how these bacterial predators interact with healthy corals.

“Before we could ask what microbial predation does within a complex microbiome, we needed to establish that these predators could persist within corals without negatively affecting the host,” says Speare. “That work gave us the foundation to start asking much bigger ecological questions.”

The Sustainability Next Seed Grant, administered by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, also supported workshops and collaboration-building efforts that strengthened partnerships with the University of Miami’s Lirman Lab and Rescue a Reef which provide corals and expertise for ongoing restoration-focused research.

Looking Ahead

“The flexibility that comes with this funding is incredibly exciting,” says Speare. “We have five years to follow the biology wherever it leads us. If we discover an unexpected interaction or mechanism, we have the freedom to pursue it rather than being constrained by a single predefined project. That gives us the opportunity to build a much broader understanding of how microbial predation influences coral health.”

Support Acknowledgement

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number 1R35GM165598.

Through a Next Gen STEM (NGS) NASA Aerospace Skilled Technical Workforce Hubs (NAS_Hub) grant award, Georgia Tech will play a central role in addressing a critical labor shortage in the booming aerospace industry and enhance the state’s role as an aerospace industry leader in the global space economy.

Beginning this fall, the three-year, $1.5 million award will establish the Southeast Space Technology & Aerospace Readiness Skills (SE-STARS) Hub. The hub will expand opportunities for training and workforce readiness in high-demand technical careers in aerospace.
The SE-STARS Hub includes the Georgia Space Grant Consortium (GSGC), Georgia Tech’s Space Research Institute (SRI), the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI), the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG), Georgia Southern University, Georgia College and Career Academies, Georgia Aerospace & Defense Alliance (GADA), and select Georgia aerospace employers to support the growing aerospace industry and NASA missions.

Aerospace products are Georgia’s No. 1 export and the state has more than 800 companies supporting aviation, manufacturing, research, maintenance, repair, and operations.  Many aerospace and engineering positions rely on skilled technical workers whose training pathways do not require a four-year, or advanced degree. There are significant gaps in technical roles such as machinists, electronics technicians, test operators, and systems integrators. These shortages are driven by an aging workforce and a projected national shortfall of at least one million skilled technical workers by 2030. (National Academics of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, 2025). The gap also stems from the rapid pace of technological advancement, where even current skills can quickly become obsolete if not constantly renewed.  All this combines to create an urgent need for training to support new and sustainable aerospace career pathways. 

Stephen Ruffin, interim chair of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and GSGC director will serve as the principal investigator (PI).  Jud Ready, executive director of SRI; Lori Skillings, GSGC; Hossein Taheri, Georgia Southern University; and Steven Ferguson, GTMI, will serve as co-PIs. Jeffrey McNabb, a research engineer in Georgia Tech’s Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL), will serve as the program manager, leading day-to-day operations and coordinating the project team.

"This initiative strengthens Georgia's position as a leader in aerospace innovation and manufacturing while providing new opportunities for students and industries across the state," said Ruffin.

Coordination between public education systems, industry, and workforce agencies can sometimes be limited. SE-STARS will act as a "hub" to bridge these gaps, connecting Georgia Tech and its specialized research institutes with TCSG’s 22 colleges and 88 campuses to provide statewide access to training.
“Another advantage of the program is the stronger network it creates,” said Ruffin. “Each organization in the SE-STARS team has unique capabilities but together we will strengthen the technical workforce pipeline across Georgia and the broader Southeast.”

The SE-STARS team will collaborate with industry partners to develop curriculum aligned with workforce needs. “The easily ported curricula we develop will be tailored for other institutions to adopt directly, creating a consistent foundation of skills and competencies that employers can universally expect from program graduates across Georgia,” Ready said.

Students will access training through a statewide network of technical colleges serving as regional instructional nodes, which offer flexible online options and hands-on paid apprenticeships to ensure broad geographic reach. 

The program also reaches K-12 and adult learners through career academies and specialized STEM labs, creating a structured, sustainable transition from early education to high-demand aerospace credentials. GTMI will support this work through its Advanced Manufacturing Pathways Program, which connects industry-informed training with pathways into high-demand advanced manufacturing careers.

“Georgia's expanding aerospace and space sectors are creating high-paying jobs and driving economic growth,” said Ruffin. “This program will help develop the skilled workforce needed to support that growth and Georgia’s competitiveness in the space economy.” 

Organized by the Georgia Forestry Foundation (GFF) in partnership with the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business, Clemson University, and the University of Georgia (UGA) Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, the trip brought together university researchers, foresters, potential carbon credit buyers, and family landowners. 

Georgia is the number one forestry state in the country, with more than 22 million of its roughly 24 million forested acres held in private hands. According to the Southern Group of State Foresters, forests and the forest products industry in the Southern U.S. provide for more than 18% of the world’s pulpwood for paper and paper-related products and 7% of the world’s industrial roundwood. The timber industry also supports thousands of rural livelihoods and sequesters enormous amounts of carbon. Yet today, Georgia forests are under pressure due to natural disasters and market changes. 

The field tour promoted a Georgia-specific carbon exchange that has the potential to save forests, help companies purchase high quality carbon credits, and provide co-benefits for the entire state. 

Pressure Points: Helene’s Wake and Market Headwinds 

Across pine-forested Southeast Georgia, the devastation left by Hurricane Helene remains impossible to miss. A year and a half later, the cleanup – which is slow, expensive, and disheartening – is still ongoing across thousands of acres. Downed timber, too old to be sold for profit, lies in heaps. Throughout the field tour, landowners and foresters shared personal narratives that made it easy to feel the weight of what has been lost. 

Helene only worsened troubles that were already underway. The markets for timber and pulpwood have been weakening. Demand for paper products has fallen sharply, taking pulpwood prices with it. In the last year alone, three mills have closed in Georgia. 

Do I bother to replant? If I plant, will someone actually buy my timber in 20 years? These are the questions landowners across Georgia are wrestling with. Landowners’ decisions today can lead to a future with fewer forested acres, less healthy forests, and forests converted to development – a loss that is permanent. 

The pressing question throughout the field tour was: What happens next? 

Storytelling Matters: The Power of the Personal 

One of the benefits of a field tour is the chance to hear firsthand, personal accounts from the people whose livelihoods depend on forests. 

The tour began in Emanuel County at the Willie Hodges Family Farm Estate. Herbert Hodges welcomed the group to the 600-acre property his family has stewarded for four generations. Hodges shows his respect for the land through thoughtful stewardship – for which he was honored when he was named 2025 Conservationist of the Year by the Georgia Association of Conservation Districts. However, Hodges worries whether the fifth generation will keep the land, and he wants to demonstrate to his heirs that the land is worth holding onto. He remembers his father telling him, “Never get rid of the land. As long as you keep it, you have somewhere to live, somewhere to go.” 

Matt Hestad, senior vice president of GFF, said, “Mr. Hodges has to identify new opportunities for his property not only to keep his family engaged but also to prove the land is economically valuable, both today and into the future.” 

The carbon exchange, if built well, could be exactly that kind of new opportunity. 

Building a Georgia Carbon Exchange 

The initiative to develop a Georgia Carbon Exchange, launched in 2025, is being led collaboratively by the organizers of the field tour. It’s designed to create a voluntary carbon credit marketplace specifically tailored to Georgia’s forest landscape, Georgia’s landowners, and companies that are interested in purchasing high quality carbon credits. 

David Eady, director of industry engagement at the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business, described the vision: “We're looking at creating a marketplace for companies doing business in Georgia or headquartered in Georgia, so they can acquire credits that specifically benefit local communities and ecosystems. We want to make sure that we can continue to manage our valuable forest resources that make up well over half of the land in Georgia.”   

“Companies are concerned about sustainability because their customers are – and one of the things that that's manifested is a market for carbon credits,” said Leslie Boby, director of the UGA Southern Regional Extension Forestry. “Being in forestry, we have the original carbon sequestration system: trees. And we have a lot of trees in Georgia.” 

The foundation for the Georgia Carbon Exchange already exists, waiting to be built on. 

All the Players at the Table 

The January tour was a pilot that can be replicated for other groups of potential carbon buyers, policymakers, and stakeholders who need to understand what is at stake in Georgia’s forests before they can meaningfully invest in their future. 

Hestad described what made this first tour valuable: “We need all the players at the table: academics, buyers, and landowners. I feel like we’ve learned from a variety of people about forest management – from a private family landowner about intergenerational challenges, from a recreation-focused landowner about wildlife management, and from landowners who have been impacted by Hurricane Helene. We’ve been provided with context for how a carbon exchange could serve those different sectors of landowners.” 

For industry representatives on the tour, the experience was eye-opening. They joined the tour to learn more about recovery efforts, community support, and the mechanics of a carbon exchange. At the end of the tour, they said they had a clearer sense of both the urgency and the opportunity. 

Clay said, “Landowners are focused on the economics of forestry, and buyers are looking for quality credits. I think there's a lot of opportunity for both of these things to happen.” 

A successful carbon exchange requires trust, understanding, and shared purpose to be cultivated deliberately. Tours like this one are part of that cultivation. 

A Common Goal in Focus 

Georgia has everything it needs to make a carbon exchange work: the forests, the science, the institutions, and the will. What it needs now is exactly what the field tour was designed to build: awareness, connection, and shared commitment among the people and organizations whose decisions will shape the future of the state’s forests. 

Zach Johnson, procurement manager at Beasley Timber Management, LLC, told the group: “With every one green ton of tree growth, you sequester approximately one metric ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Let’s find a way to certify this wonderful resource we have and prop up these jobs in Georgia – before it’s too late.” 

Maintaining Georgia’s forests is not only about carbon. Well-managed forests filter water, support native wildlife, improve air quality, protect public health, and provide opportunities for outdoor recreation. These are co-benefits that a carbon credit does not fully capture but that are very much part of the value proposition for maintaining Georgia’s private forests. As stated by Yanshu Li, associate professor of forest economics at UGA: “If we take care of our forests, our forests will take care of us.” 

Among the pines of Southeast Georgia, a common goal came into focus. The forests are worth saving. And the right people are coming together with the right plan to make it happen. 

The answer is yes. Ozdemir demonstrated the technique by taking a piece of paper with a small Waldo-shaped hole cut out and placing it over the page. The demonstration confirms that Waldo is on the page without revealing his location or other details and is a simple example of a concept called a zero-knowledge proof.

In computer science, zero-knowledge proofs allow one person to prove that something is true without revealing the information that makes it true.

These types of problems sit at the center of Ozdemir’s work. As a computer scientist and cryptographer, he studies ways to use mathematics and computer programs to protect information. But his work goes beyond creating new methods for keeping data secret. He is interested in connecting those methods to the computer systems that use them.

“I get excited about what no one else is working on,” he said. “What I’m excited about now is how you relate the security of a computer system to a crypto scheme.”

Two recent papers published at USENIX Security show how Ozdemir is applying this approach to real-world privacy and security problems.

One of these problems is how to handle sensitive information without revealing it.

Imagine two organizations want to combine or analyze information, but neither wants to share its private data with the other. Cryptography can make this possible, but some of these privacy protections can be slow and difficult to use with large amounts of information.

Ozdemir and his collaborators developed a new system called FLOSS (Fast Linear Online Secret-Shared Shuffling) to make one of these tasks much faster.

FLOSS allows two parties to mix a set of private information without either party seeing the original data or learning the final order. This process, known as shuffling, is useful in privacy-preserving applications such as data analysis, anonymous messaging, and private advertising.

In tests, FLOSS shuffled more than one million items in less than half a second, making it more than 800 times faster than previous leading methods.

FLOSS achieves much of this speed by doing some of the hard mathematical work in advance, before the actual data is available. When the data arrives, the system can complete the shuffle quickly, with very little communication between the two computers.

The system is designed to protect against cheating. If one of the parties tries to manipulate the process or access information it shouldn’t, FLOSS can detect the problem and stop the computation.

The researchers also used FLOSS to create a faster way to sort private information. Sorting is a basic computer task but doing it while keeping the information secret can be expensive. Making that process faster could allow privacy-preserving tools to handle much larger amounts of data.

Ozdemir tackled another problem through a project called Orbit: How can computers perform useful work on information that remains encrypted?

Fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, is a form of encryption that allows computers to perform calculations on protected data without first decrypting it. For example, a hospital could send encrypted medical information to a cloud service for analysis without the service seeing the patients' records.

The challenge is that this type of computing can be extremely slow.

Orbit is a computing tool called a compiler that helps make these encrypted calculations more efficient. A compiler takes computer code and turns it into instructions that a computer can run. Orbit examines an entire computation and identifies more efficient ways to handle some of the most expensive steps in fully homomorphic encryption.

Rather than treating those steps separately, Orbit looks at how they work together and identifies opportunities to reduce the amount of work the computer must do.

In tests, Orbit was between 1.19 and 1.73 times faster than previous leading systems on the workloads studied, including complex tasks such as running artificial intelligence models. The calculations also remained within 0.3% of the accuracy of those performed on unencrypted data.

For Ozdemir, projects like FLOSS and Orbit are part of a broader goal: making advanced cryptography practical enough to use with the computer systems people use every day. 

Now at Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP), Ozdemir is recruiting Ph.D. students from across the computing stack to work with him. He was drawn to Georgia Tech in part for its multidisciplinary approach to security.

“I also just love being around universities,” he said.

At SCP, Ozdemir plans to continue exploring programmable cryptography across the computing stack, integrating cryptography, compilers, and automated reasoning to address security problems from multiple angles. He received his Ph.D. at Stanford University and bachelor's degree from Harvey Mudd College. 

For Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Veronica Rivera, the growing role of AI in daily life raises important questions about what happens when technology designed to help people puts their privacy and safety at risk.

Rivera studied AI at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but her research has increasingly focused on how people interact with technology and the risks that can emerge from these interactions. Her work examines technology-facilitated risks and abuse. She uses research and innovative design approaches to understand digital safety risks and develop tools that better protect people.

One area she is exploring through her recent Computing Research Association Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship for Early Career Scholars is the design of safe AI tools for labor unions.

“Unions are developing AI tools to sort through complaints,” she said. “Many of these are built with proprietary AI models, which leads us to ask what the risks are of sharing personal information through these tools.”

Rivera wants to give unions more control over how workers’ data is collected and used. One way she plans to explore this is through a workshop at the upcoming ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, where union leaders and technical experts collaborate to develop a secure reporting tool.

This research will build on Rivera’s recent work focusing on platform-based gig workers. A paper she published this year at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security examined how freelance workers often use secretive "digital whisper networks," informal online communities where people warn one another about workplace abuse.

Rivera and her team found that these workers often avoided formal reporting channels when they experienced wage theft, discrimination, health and safety violations, or sexual misconduct. The study highlighted the need for secure channels that allow workers to report abuse and organize without further endangering themselves.

“There needs to be a way to report this abuse,” Rivera said. “But how you do that in a safe and secure way is something we don’t yet have answers for.”

Rivera is also expanding her research beyond the workplace to examine technology-based threats and abuse in romantic relationships. As a new assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, she plans to study how AI can blur the line between technology and intimacy.

Consider a person who creates an AI chatbot that imitates someone they know, turning that person’s likeness, personality, or private information into a virtual romantic partner without their consent. If that happens, Rivera asks, what protections does the person have? How can the chatbot be reported and removed?

Existing policies and reporting systems may not adequately address situations like these. In fact, they can pose new challenges for people whose identities or personal information are used without their permission.

Another project Rivera would like to explore is how platforms handle abuse involving romantic chatbots. Rivera has reviewed Reddit discussions in which users expressed concerns about reporting abusive behavior and about what happens to the intimate information they share with their chatbots.

“There is a lot of confusion on what these platforms know about their users’ intimate details based on their chats,” she said. “There is also a lot that isn’t known on the back-end of abuse reporting.”

Rivera has identified a need to design safer reporting features so people feel comfortable reporting abuse while also knowing their personal information will remain private.

She plans to cover these topics and more this fall in her new course that explores sociotechnical security. Rivera says working within SCP’s interdisciplinary structure gives her the opportunity to explore these research problems from multiple angles.

“It is hard to find a place for the work I do in security and privacy,” Rivera said. “Our goal is to protect users from bad things, and SCP approaches it from several different angles.”

For Rivera, this means studying not only how technology can be secured, but how it can be designed to protect the people who rely on it.

Rather than rushing the drive, the couple’s cross-country road trip included several stops to visit family and friends, explore new parts of the country, experience changing landscapes, and enjoy the adventure of the open road.

The journey began in Claremont, California, where they met as students at Harvey Mudd College. After packing their belongings into Pods, they headed north to Sacramento to spend the Fourth of July with family. From there, they drove to Eugene, Oregon, to visit more family and friends.

Then they turned east and began the long drive to Georgia. 

Rivera and Ozdemir stayed two nights and a full day at nearly every stop. The plan was to have enough time to experience each place they visited while still making it to Atlanta in time to watch the World Cup Final at their new place.

The trip went well overall, but summer weather presented challenges along the way.

“At every stop, we experienced a different kind of heat,” Ozdemir said. “Boise’s dry heat was the worst, and Nashville came in second for its humidity.”

“Boise’s heat made it feel like our skin was going to melt off our bones,” Rivera said.

Both said the trip was unlike anything they had done before. They had traveled outside California, but neither had taken a road trip of this scale. The journey gave the couple a chance to see much more of the country.

For Rivera, one highlight was the ecological diversity.

“Oregon was lush in parts, and very dry and flat, like California,” she said. “We just got back from Germany, and in Europe you have to travel between countries to see the diversity we saw in the U.S.”

The drive took them through the Rockies, the Great Plains, and ultimately the lush mountains of Northwest Georgia.

“I didn’t want to fall asleep in the car because I didn’t want to miss the scenery,” Rivera said. “I really liked the mountains in Oregon and western Colorado.”

Ozdemir also enjoyed the changing landscapes, but he said his favorite part of the trip was the people they met along the way. He enjoyed seeing family and friends they do not regularly get to visit.

The couple found different ways to pass the time in the car. As they drove through each state, Ozdemir would look up facts about it and read them aloud. They also filled the miles with music and audiobooks, listening to two books from Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid series.

“It kept us guessing until the end,” Rivera said of the audiobooks.

The playlist ranged from Noah Kahan to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Southern rock classics. When Rivera was driving, Taylor Swift was a regular in the mix.

The stop in Nashville added another memorable soundtrack to their road trip. They were struck by the abundance of live music throughout the city. From the farmers market to restaurants, “it felt like everyone was trying to make it as a musician,” Rivera said.

To keep them company during their journey, Rivera and Ozdemir shared their road trip with an unexpected travel companion: Buzz the Bee.

When Ozdemir interviewed at Georgia Tech, he received the plushie as a gift. The plushie accompanied them on the cross-country trip, appearing in photographs at Utah’s Arches National Park and beside several state welcome signs along their route.

After their weeks long long odyssey, they arrived in Atlanta in mid-July, just in time for the World Cup final. Or so they thought. Atlanta traffic and spotty internet nearly derailed their plans.

But after arriving at their Midtown apartment, the couple managed to stream about half the game over a mobile hotspot before their wireless provider limited their service.

“We watched the second half of the game with varying levels of video quality,” Ozdemir said.

With the journey from where they met to their new home in Atlanta behind them, Rivera and Ozdemir are preparing for the new academic year. Ozdemir is a security researcher specializing in programmable cryptography, while Rivera focuses on human-centered security and privacy.

As part of the existing Georgia Traffic Management Center (TMC), those systems notify drivers of changing highway conditions, operate traffic management devices, and help the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) identify and respond to traffic issues requiring immediate attention.

In December 2025, Georgia Tech cybersecurity researchers began working with GDOT to ensure the security of those networked systems and devices. As part of this advanced cybersecurity project, they are applying machine learning (ML), a type of artificial intelligence (AI), to safeguard existing systems and set the stage for future automation.

Read the full article on the Georgia Tech Research Institute news page

Instead of becoming steadily stickier as they are pulled apart, soft hydrogels first become less adhesive and then more adhesive as the pulling speed increases, revealing a previously unknown "sweet spot" where detachment is easier. The discovery challenges a long-held assumption in adhesion mechanics and reveals a new physical mechanism that governs how soft materials attach and detach.

"We expected the adhesion to increase continuously with pulling speed, as predicted by classical theories," said Yuhang Hu, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "Instead, we found the exact opposite over a broad range of speeds. That told us there had to be a completely different physical process at work."

Read the full story.

"One of the goals of the program is to give students the time and support needed to make meaningful progress on their dissertation research while helping them understand the broader policy, economic, and societal implications of their work," said Laura Taylor, director of EPIcenter.

The stipends enable participants to focus exclusively on clearly defined research goals. The program also supports peer discussions, communication training, and interdisciplinary learning opportunities designed to strengthen both their research and professional development.

This year's cohort explored topics ranging from electricity markets and air pollution to critical mineral supply chains and grid modernization, highlighting the breadth of energy-related research taking place across Georgia Tech.

Exploring Complex Energy Challenges

Ana Mazmishvili, who studies environmental and energy economics, used the summer to examine how climate policies affect communities across state lines.

"My research measures who is actually exposed to pollution from power plants when some states adopt climate regulations to cut emissions while neighboring regions do not," Mazmishvili said. "Because air doesn't stop at state borders, the key question is what happens once the pollution is emitted, and who ends up breathing it."

Her work focuses on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program in the Northeast, and investigates whether the benefits and burdens of emissions reductions are distributed equitably between regulated and neighboring states.

Mazmishvili said the program provided valuable time to focus on her job-market paper, a central component of her dissertation.

"The regular meetings with the program director and other fellows create useful accountability checkpoints and let me hear perspectives from people in very different fields," she said. "We're also learning how to make academic research understandable to a general audience, a skill I expect to use well past this summer."

Industrial and systems engineering doctoral student Faeze Fahimi Aghda spent the summer developing an optimization model for the U.S. gallium supply chain, a critical component of many advanced technologies.

Her research uses mathematical modeling to examine where and when domestic gallium processing facilities should be established under the threat of supply disruptions.

"Working on my research through EPIcenter has taught me to look at my problem from a policy point of view rather than focusing only on the math," Fahimi Aghda said. "The feedback within the meetings helped me improve my model."

Ryan Anthony, in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, explored how one of the largest oil shocks in U.S. history affected electricity customers and whether utility ownership influenced the impact on consumers.

"So far, my research suggests that it mattered a lot,” Anthony said. “Municipal utilities held rates down and absorbed many of the costs, while private, investor-owned utilities passed more costs through to their customers."

Anthony said the program provided critical support for the archival research required for the project.

"My project depends on data that only exists in old government reports, and that kind of archival work is difficult to fund," he said. "EPIcenter gave me the time and space to do it properly."

Connecting Research to Real-World Impact

For Samin Alipour, the summer provided an opportunity to explore how electric grids can adapt to growing numbers of distributed energy resources.

"Most electric distribution systems were built like one-way roads, carrying power from a substation to homes and businesses," Alipour said. "Rooftop solar, batteries, and electric vehicles are turning those roads into two-way systems."

Her research examines how these emerging technologies can be coordinated to increase grid flexibility and clean energy adoption while maintaining safety and reliability and ensuring that costs and benefits are distributed fairly.

With support from EPIcenter, Alipour focused on the economic and policy dimensions of those challenges. "I did not want my research to remain only a technical model," she said. "The program has helped me connect the technical results of my dissertation to economic value, reliability, equity and compensation policy."

One study developed during the summer was accepted for presentation at a specialized power systems conference, an achievement Alipour credits in part to the opportunity to focus on the broader implications of her work.

Building the Next Generation of Energy Scholars

Beyond advancing individual research projects, the Summer Research Program encourages students to engage with colleagues from different disciplines and develop skills for communicating complex ideas to broader audiences.

“Through regular cohort meetings, participants build a community of accountability, discuss research challenges, explore interdisciplinary energy topics, and develop communication skills,” said Gil Gonzalez, program support coordinator for EPIcenter. “Students also write a research-focused blog post for EPIcenter and present their work at the program's fall workshop, which allows them to share their research with the broader Georgia Tech energy community.”

As EPIcenter continues to support interdisciplinary energy scholarship at Georgia Tech, the Summer Research Program equips future leaders with the tools to address complex energy challenges through technological innovation, informed policy, and economic analysis.