Ashley Ni first came to BridgeUP STEM as a high school student, joining in the 2024-2025 academic year. Now she is a computer science student, returning to the program as a Helen Fellow and serving as the first BridgeUP STEM participant to experience the program as both a scholar and a fellow.
As a high school student at Global Impact Academy in Fairburn, Georgia, Ni worked with four professors, spending about two months with each and exploring different areas of computing.
“It was really cool being able to experience the different forms of computing and their significance,” Ni said. “One day I would be playing AI literacy games with Dr. Judith Uchidiuno, then the next day I’d be training my own ML model with Dr. Sonia Chernova.”
BridgeUP STEM is a College of Computing program that guides first-generation and low-income students by moving them beyond the traditional classroom. Funded by the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation, the program provides early, hands-on exposure to coding skills and computing research activities.
Ni was interested in technology and STEM but planned to pursue a career in healthcare after high school because she considered it a more practical path. However, in her junior year, she stepped out of her comfort zone and chose a path that felt foreign to her.
“BridgeUP really helped me through my journey. It allowed me to see what computing was all about and made me confident in my choice to switch paths,” she said.
Now, as a Helen Fellow, Ni continues to explore the intersection of computing and health through research in the lab of School of Interactive Computing Associate Professor Rosa Arriaga. She is working on TEAMMAIT, an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant project focused on understanding how mental health clinicians interact with AI.
Georgia Tech researchers are developing TEAMMAIT as an AI teammate for mental health work, with the goal of providing insights and feedback to help mental health professionals.
Along with lab-based research, Ni’s fellowship also connects her with the current BridgeUP STEM cohort.
“I’d say this role is both a mentorship and a research role because, in addition to the research work, I’ll also be assisting Dr. Arriaga in the spring semester by mentoring her research seminars with the BridgeUP STEM scholars,” Ni said.
Ni says that returning to the program has already felt nostalgic, especially at the first BridgeUP STEM meeting of the semester.
“I met Dr. Judith as well as the people from her lab who also recognized me. It made me feel very happy seeing how enthusiastic these new scholars are, and it feels like so much yet so little has changed,” Ni said.
For Ni, returning as a fellow is an opportunity to share the experience that helped her find a new direction. She hopes it can encourage other students who may be uncertain about their paths.
“BridgeUP STEM is a program that is near and dear to me. It allowed me to find myself and build a path for my future career goals,” she said.
“I wanted to return to BridgeUP STEM as a Helen Fellow because I would like to inspire those coming after me and share my story with them. I want to let them know that it’s never too late to go for what they’re truly passionate about even if you feel like it’s a race against time.”
Her advice to students now beginning their BridgeUP journey is to ask questions, talk to the researchers, and make the most of the experience.
As she returns to the program with a new perspective, Ni carries one lesson from her time as a scholar: “Time flies and you should make the most of it.”
Ashley Ni first came to BridgeUP STEM as a high school student, joining in the 2024-2025 academic year. Now she is a computer science student, returning to the program as a Helen Fellow and serving as the first BridgeUP STEM participant to experience the program as both a scholar and a fellow.
]]>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.
]]>The kitchen serves students in need with groceries or meals, works to reduce food waste on campus, and is part of Students’ Temporary Assistance and Resources (STAR) Services.
“The STAR Office is so grateful to the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy for sponsoring a food drive this semester,” said STAR Program Director Steven Fazenbaker. “Your successful campaign has put us in a position to serve over 300 students by keeping Klemis Kitchen fully stocked with our most popular shelf-stable food items for the rest of the fall semester.”
“It also allows us to get a head start restocking Klemis Kitchen during the winter break, so we will be ready when the spring semester begins. Thank you so much for your over-the-top generosity.”
The school exceeded its goal by $1,600 and surpassed last year’s donation of $2,110.
Director of Research Operations Mary Helen Hayes organized the food drive and spent September fundraising.
“While I organized and led the drive, its success came from the generosity and community spirit of our faculty and staff,” Hayes said.
“Thank you to everyone who contributed and helped make it possible. SCP is proud to support such a meaningful cause, and we truly hope our contribution makes a difference for Klemis Kitchen and the students it serves.”
While SCP hosts this food drive once a year, Klemis Kitchen accepts donations year-round.
Visit Klemis Kitchen to learn more about how you can help. The Kitchen relies 100% on donations, including leftovers from the dining halls, donations from community partners like grocery stores and churches, and food drives sponsored by departments across campus.
Photos by John Popham/College of Computing
]]>In a study accepted for the 2026 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Georgia Tech researchers interviewed 20 military sailors about their cybersecurity experiences, training, and responses to hypothetical scenarios. Their findings point to a gap between how mariners are trained to handle emergencies and how cyberattacks can compromise the systems they depend on.
The study found several gaps in how crews prepare for cyber threats:
These gaps matter because cyberattacks can compromise a system without causing it to stop working. For example, an attacker could manipulate navigation data, leaving a crew to make decisions based on false information.
“I’d assume it was anything but cyber at first. It would probably take me quite some time to get to that conclusion,” one participant told the researchers.
The team examined three hypothetical scenarios: GPS spoofing, loss of propulsion control in a high-traffic area, and failure of electronic navigation systems in a congested channel at night.
In each scenario, mariners would first focus on keeping the vessel safe, using established procedures to stabilize the ship and troubleshoot its systems. While this response is essential during an emergency, it could delay recognition of an attack if crews do not consider that the system or its data may have been compromised.
For example, a ship navigating a narrow channel depends on accurate location information, but what happens when its navigation systems appear to work normally while a hacker manipulates that data?
An attacker could use GPS spoofing to falsify a vessel’s reported position. If the false position is close enough to the ship’s actual location, a mariner might not notice anything wrong. The vessel could gradually head toward shallow water or another obstacle without triggering an obvious error or alarm.
“By the time the mariner realizes something is wrong, the ship’s size and limited maneuverability could make it too late to avoid a grounding or collision,” said Anna Raymaker, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who studies maritime security.
The scenario illustrates a central challenge in maritime cybersecurity: An equipment failure may be easy to recognize, but a cyberattack that provides false information can be much harder to detect.
Batten the Hatches: Cybersecurity with Military Mariners was written by master’s student Ryan Von Brock, Raymaker, Research Scientist Animesh Chhotaray, Associate Professors Frank Li and Saman Zonouz, and Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Raheem Beyah.
The research was conducted in Georgia Tech’s Cyber-Physical Security Lab, a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Photos by Terence Rushin/College of Computing
]]>New research from Georgia Tech suggests that a simple change to a chatbot’s instructions could reduce that risk. The work was accepted to the ACM AI Letters publication.
Researchers Lorenzo de la Loza and Vijay Madisetti tested eight AI models in 1,280 experiments involving simulated conversations about delusional beliefs. They found that instructions designed to discourage excessive agreement reduced the models’ confirmation of those beliefs by 73.8%. Adding a self-reflection step increased the reduction to 77%.
“We think that this paper will help AI providers and solution creators better understand how best to protect and safeguard their users from harming themselves,” Madisetti said. “This may make AI safer for all of us.”
AI chatbots are designed to be helpful and supportive. But that behavior can become risky when a chatbot agrees with a user’s beliefs without questioning whether they reflect reality. Researchers call this behavior sycophancy.
Courtney Crooks, a principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and adjunct faculty member in Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, said chatbot conversations can have both positive and negative effects.
People may feel more comfortable discussing difficult thoughts with a chatbot than with another person. But if the chatbot always agrees, users may miss opportunities to question their beliefs or consider other points of view.
The same behavior that makes a chatbot feel supportive, Crooks explained, can also encourage harmful patterns of thinking.
The researchers tested instructions that told AI models not to reinforce users’ beliefs simply to be agreeable. The team evaluated the models using 16 clinically derived scenarios involving delusional beliefs.
The team also tested other safety tools, including systems designed to flag potentially harmful content. The results suggest that changing a chatbot’s instructions can be an effective way to reduce excessive agreement in the scenarios tested.
Crooks called the findings a promising direction for future research combining psychology and AI safety.
The study did not test people in clinical settings or prove that the approach prevents real-world harm. However, it offers developers a potential way to make chatbots more careful when responding to vulnerable users without building an entirely new AI model.
]]>Communications Officer for the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
]]>Georgia Tech contributors included corresponding author Christopher E. Carr, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, and Research Scientist José L. Ramírez-Colón.
The technique the team developed focuses on the handedness, or chirality, of amino acids. Biotic processes largely use one form of amino acid, whereas nonliving processes produce both forms in roughly the same amounts. As a result, the ratio of amino acid forms present can be used as a potential indicator of life.
To detect these ratios, the researchers harnessed recent developments in nanotechnology: passing molecules through a gap between two gold nanowires. The resulting technique distinguished between amino acid forms with over 80% accuracy.
The team hopes their work could lead to compact instruments capable of analyzing samples and identifying biosignatures.
This story is adapted from an article originally published by the University of Osaka. Read the full story in the University of Osaka newsroom.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-77947-6
Funding: Japan Science and Technology Agency, NASA PICASSO
]]>Ramblin’ Royalty, hosted by the Student Center Programs Council (SCPC) within Student and Campus Event Centers (SCEC), celebrates students who embody Georgia Tech’s motto, Progress and Service. Previously known as Mr. and Ms. Georgia Tech, the program has evolved into a more inclusive scholarship initiative to represent all students who are making a positive impact on campus.
A College of Sciences student was among the five students selected for this recognition.
Giuli has embraced Georgia Tech’s motto of Progress and Service through a commitment to expanding educational opportunity and building connections across diverse communities. As a recipient of the G. Wayne Clough Tech Promise Scholarship, she’s transforming gratitude into action as a passionate advocate for the initiatives that make a Georgia Tech education accessible to students from all backgrounds. She has represented the institute at various events including the Gold and White Gala and Scholarship Brunch, and in 2025 was honored to serve as the keynote student speaker at the USG Scholarships and Awards Gala, sharing the impact of scholarship support and promoting access to higher education. Her dedication to service and representation also extends to campus life. Through Phi Mu, she’s aware of the value of connecting across different perspectives and backgrounds. As Phorum Lead, she facilitated educational programming focused on topics like implicit bias and cultural awareness, helping foster meaningful dialogue within her community. Her Georgia Tech journey reflects gratitude, advocacy, and a belief in the transformative power of opportunity. Representing Georgia Tech as Ramblin’ Royalty would be a celebration of her commitment and the impact she hopes to continue making for future Yellow Jackets.
After a grueling, world-class competition, the team won the $4 million first-place prize in August 2025.
The team has since disbanded. Some members have moved into the corporate world, while others continue in academia. Despite these varied paths, Team Atlanta’s search for breakthrough AI cybersecurity solutions continues.
Team Atlanta lead Taesoo Kim, principal security researcher Dongkwan Kim, and three other former team members joined Microsoft Security after the competition, where they continue to work on AI and cybersecurity in the Frontier Offensive Research & Generative Exploitation (FORGE) Lab.
The move has given the researchers an opportunity to apply concepts from AIxCC to real-world software. It has also exposed them to challenges that are difficult to replicate in a competition or research lab.
Dongkwan Kim said that team members continue to share what they learned through research papers, reports, software, and benchmarks. At Microsoft, these lessons are tested against real customer code.
This work led to MDASH, Microsoft's multi-agent, multi-model system for vulnerability discovery and remediation. The system uses more than 100 AI agents to search for vulnerabilities, validate potential findings, and help develop fixes.
Rather than asking a single AI model if a piece of code contains a vulnerability, MDASH can examine a problem using multiple agents. The system can also try to create an exploit to determine whether a potential vulnerability is real and reachable.
For Dongkwan Kim and the other former Team Atlanta members at Microsoft, moving from AIxCC to MDASH showed how research can look different when applied to real software.
“AIxCC was not an endpoint for Team Atlanta,” he said. “We continue sharing what we learned through technical reports, papers, open artifacts, and benchmarks for vulnerability discovery and patching.”
Working with customer code introduced new challenges for the Microsoft team. The researchers had to consider security boundaries, existing development processes, how findings would be reviewed, and how vulnerabilities would be prioritized for action.
These challenges created a new feedback loop between research and product development. The team took ideas from AIxCC, test them on real software, learn where they worked and where they fell short, and use those lessons to improve the system.
The experience also showed that AI does not replace the need for cybersecurity experts. Human researchers are still needed to provide context, decide how to break down difficult problems, validate findings, understand attack paths, and determine the potential impact of a vulnerability.
Taesoo Kim, a professor in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and vice president of security research at Microsoft, said the competition continues to influence the Microsoft team's work.
“Every single activity that we’ve done at Microsoft was influenced by AIxCC,” he said in a 2026 interview with Microsoft.
The work has continued to grow. In 2026, Microsoft introduced MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, an AI model built specifically for cybersecurity and designed to work with MDASH.
The model is designed to handle many of MDASH's tasks while allowing larger AI models to focus on harder problems. Microsoft reported that replacing 80% of the models used by MDASH with MAI-Cyber-1-Flash increased its performance on the CyberGym benchmark from 88.4% to 95.95%.
The benchmark includes more than 1,500 examples from 188 software projects. Microsoft also reported that the new setup can achieve similar performance at half the cost of the previous MDASH configuration.
“AIxCC has sparked cybersecurity innovation across the globe, from frontier AI companies to small academic labs,” said Taesoo Kim. “It is an incredibly exciting time to be working in AI-driven security engineering and research, as we see AI fundamentally reshape how we find and fix vulnerabilities at scale.”
The AIxCC experience also continues to shape cybersecurity research at Georgia Tech.
Jiho Kim, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who was part of Team Atlanta's research efforts, said one of the biggest lessons he’s brought back to campus was learning how AI and traditional security tools can work together.
One of these tools is fuzzing. Fuzzing tests software with large numbers of inputs to detect unexpected behavior or security problems. Large language models (LLMs), meanwhile, can reason about code and help guide the search.
During the AIxCC competition, the Team Atlanta combined these ideas in CtxFuzz, a system that uses an LLM to help guide fuzzing toward parts of software that may contain vulnerabilities.
The research was submitted to the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, where it received the ACM Distinguished Paper Award.
“Since AIxCC, we’ve continued building on some of the core findings from our two-year journey with Team Atlanta,” Jiho Kim said.
“One of the biggest lessons for us was understanding how LLMs and traditional fuzzing can work together in a mutually beneficial way, using each to overcome the limitations of the other and ultimately find more and deeper vulnerabilities.”
The researchers also wanted to make the lessons from AIxCC useful to other cybersecurity researchers.
They created an Open-Source Cyber Reasoning System Framework (OSS-CRS) and CRSBench, which provides researchers and security professionals with ways to use, test, and build on technology developed through AIxCC.
“We’ve also been focused on making the results of AIxCC useful to the broader security community,” Kim said. “We created OSS-CRS and CRSBench so that researchers and practitioners can more easily use, reproduce, and build upon the capabilities and lessons from our AIxCC work.”
The team's research has also moved beyond identifying vulnerabilities. Researchers are studying how well AI models can understand and reason about computer code.
Jiho Kim and his lab mates in the Systems Software & Security Lab developed COIN, a benchmark designed to test how well LLMs can reason about code. The work has been accepted to the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
The Georgia Tech researchers are also developing additional benchmarks to study the various types of reasoning required for cybersecurity. They are using what they learn to create new datasets and methods for training AI models focused on cybersecurity.
“We’re using what we learn from these benchmarks to train cybersecurity-focused models through new datasets and training methodologies,” Jiho Kim said.
Photos by John Popham/College of Computing
]]>Communications Officer at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
]]>Under Tech’s Transformative Teaching and Learning (TTL) strategic initiative, a group of experienced faculty have compiled the Group Project Playbook. The Playbook provides practical design and facilitation strategies for instructors interested in maximizing group project impact.
“I appreciate receiving such a well-organized collection of resources, best practices, and practical recommendations for designing and managing course projects while minimizing common challenges,” said Tatiana Rudchenko, principal lecturer in the Scheller College of Business.
Kate Williams, associate director of Transformative Teaching and Learning, notes “our annual CTL teaching survey shows collaborative learning is the most-often used high-impact teaching practice at Georgia Tech. We hope the Group Project Playbook – created by faculty, for faculty – will help instructors plan, facilitate, and evaluate group projects.”
Download the Group Project Playbook.
The Playbook was developed by the TTL Champions, a grant-funded faculty cohort.
]]>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.
]]>The Institute rose three places to No. 29 among national universities and three places to No. 6 among public national universities. It also moved from No. 108 to No. 39 among Best Value Schools, a 69-place rise and the largest year-over-year improvement among Georgia Tech’s listed rankings.
Georgia Tech also ranked No. 5 in the new Best Value Schools for the In-State Students category.
“At a time when students and families are asking important questions about the value of higher education, Georgia Tech continues to demonstrate that world-class academic quality and affordability can go hand in hand,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “Our rise among the nation’s top universities and our strong performance in value rankings reflect our commitment to delivering an education that creates opportunity, drives innovation, and creates lasting impact for our students and our communities.”
Georgia Tech’s undergraduate engineering program rose one place to No. 2 nationally, tied with Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. Every ranked Georgia Tech engineering discipline remains in the top five nationally.
Civil engineering moved into the No. 1 position, joining environmental engineering and industrial and systems engineering at the top of their respective disciplines. The Institute now holds three No. 1 undergraduate engineering rankings.
Other top engineering program rankings include:
Georgia Tech’s undergraduate computer science program held at No. 5 nationally, tied with Princeton University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Six ranked computing specialties placed among the nation’s top 10.
Cybersecurity remained No. 2, software engineering held at No. 3, and artificial intelligence and data analytics/science each ranked No. 5. Computer systems advanced one place to No. 6, while theory remained No. 10.
Georgia Tech’s undergraduate business program ranked No. 20 nationally, remaining among the country’s top 20 programs. Business analytics and management information systems each ranked No. 3. Quantitative analysis rose to No. 4, while production and operations management and supply chain management both maintained at No. 6. Finance advanced four places to No. 30.
Georgia Tech climbed seven places to No. 14 for Best Undergraduate Teaching, entering the top 20. The Institute also remained No. 3 among the nation’s Most Innovative Schools.
Experiential learning continues to distinguish the undergraduate experience. Georgia Tech ranked No. 4 for internships and co-ops, No. 12 for senior capstone experiences, and No. 14, up from No. 19, for undergraduate research and creative projects.
*Please note that this summary includes the latest rankings issued by U.S. News & World Report. Not all Georgia Tech Colleges, Schools, and subjects are ranked every year by this organization.
]]>The Georgia Tech Library was recently awarded $195,245 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to conduct a forum focused on academic library accessibility after the Title II implementation deadline.
The forum will examine the topic through two complementary lenses: Internal Operations and Implementation, including workflows, governance, and responsible artificial intelligence-assisted remediation; and External Ecosystems and Accountability, including campus partnerships, vendor relations, and user-facing impacts. Georgia Tech will host the forum at the Library in May 2027.
Project outcomes will include:
A 75-page Sustaining Compliance Playbook;
An openly accessible collection in the Georgia Tech Digital Repository featuring recordings of presentations from the forum's first day; and
A moderated community of practice listserv designed to support adoption and shared learning beyond the convening.
Partner organizations will help identify experts, promote the forum, contribute editorial guidance to the playbook, and support the community of practice. Participating organizations include the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries, Clemson University, Emory University, Florida State University, Georgia State University, North Carolina State University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Vanderbilt University.
The Library's grant team includes John Mack Freeman, principal investigator; August Engelsman, Matt Frizzell, Cliff Landis, Catherine Manci, Gabe Nagel, Cheryl Parker, Tiffany Roberts, and Leslie Sharp.
--
Now available in the Georgia Tech Digital Repository: The Georgia Tech Library as an Innovation Hub: Fostering AI Literacy Through Interdisciplinary Conversation and Collaboration by Digital Learning and Instruction Librarian Justin Ellis. The publication appears in the Georgia Tech Academic AI Playbook.
Congratulations to John Mack Freeman, director of the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons and the Office of Undergraduate Education and Student Success, on the recent publication of Discretion at the Desk: Street-Level Bureaucracy and Moral Agency in Frontline Academic Library Workers in the Journal of Academic Librarianship.
Congratulations to Georgia Tech Library Systems Technologist Thomas Waters on the publication of CompTIA Certification: An Introduction for Librarians in the latest issue of Computers in Libraries.
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.”
]]>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.
]]>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:
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.”
]]>This year, Team Blue Water – which features nine Georgia Tech participants –came out on top after three days of intense competition.
]]>Before a promising new therapy can reach a patient, researchers need to answer a deceptively simple question: Will it work?
For decades, part of the answer has come from animal testing. Animal models have helped scientists make countless medical advances and understand how potential treatments behave in a living system. But they also present scientific and ethical challenges, including one unavoidable limitation: A mouse isn't a human. This limitation is one reason many promising drug candidates fail during human clinical trials.
Now, Georgia Tech is launching a new Institute-wide initiative focused on technologies that help researchers close that gap by studying human health and disease in ways that more closely reflect human biology. This interdisciplinary venture, called Emerging Technologies for Human-Oriented Systems (ETHOS), will advance human-centered research technologies, including new approach methodologies (NAMs) that improve prediction of human responses and support the development of safer, more effective therapies.
“ETHOS reflects Georgia Tech's commitment to advancing innovative approaches to some of society's most pressing health challenges,” said Executive Vice President for Research Tim Lieuwen. “By bringing together expertise from across the Institute and investing in technologies that more closely reflect human biology, we have an opportunity to accelerate discovery, strengthen translation, and help shape the future of biomedical research."
Supported by the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research, ETHOS is built on an interdisciplinary framework that connects researchers across Georgia Tech and with clinical and translational partners. The initiative draws on expertise in bioengineering, materials science, device engineering, computing, and data science. It will be led jointly by the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) and the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS).
“What sets Georgia Tech apart is our ability to unify deep expertise in foundational life sciences, bioengineering, and materials science with artificial intelligence and data science,” said Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research Julia Kubanek. “ETHOS creates a framework for connecting those strengths, fostering new collaborations, and enabling researchers to tackle complex health challenges in ways that no single discipline could accomplish alone.”
Ankur Singh, Carl Ring Family Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University (BME), will lead ETHOS in his new administrative role as deputy director of IBB. Although ETHOS is a new initiative, Georgia Tech researchers have already begun building a NAMs community through an institutional task force and other collaborative efforts. That momentum will continue with the 2027 Suddath Symposium, which will focus on NAMs and bring researchers together across disciplines.
“Georgia Tech has expertise across the full spectrum of these approaches, from AI and computational modeling to engineered tissues and experimental systems,” said JC Gumbart, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics. “ETHOS gives us a framework to connect those strengths and accelerate human-centered biomedical research.”
Gumbart co-led the NAMs task force and is co-organizing the symposium with Shuichi Takayama, a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and chair of regenerative engineering medicine within BME.
What are new approach methodologies, or NAMs, and how can they help researchers address human health challenges?
NAMs include both physical models, such as organoids and organ-on-chip technologies, and computational models that use artificial intelligence. Each approach has its own advantages and limitations.
Organoids and organ-on-chip are living tissue systems grown in the lab that mimic key features of human biology and help researchers study how the body may respond to new drugs or treatments. These models allow researchers to observe biological responses in human tissue systems, but they are limited by the steep cost of time and resources required to create them.
Computational models take advantage of AI and supercomputing technology to rapidly explore and predict thousands of possibilities. They use existing datasets to examine complex relationships at scale and simulate how potential changes might affect a system. Though these simulations can provide a large-scale prediction of what might happen, they can’t provide evidence of how cells actually respond.
ETHOS emphasizes a bidirectional approach that combines engineered biological systems with predictive computational models. For instance, a scientist who is testing a new drug on an organoid may use AI to predict how the drug could affect a larger population with differing demographics. Conversely, a researcher using a computational model may use an organ-on-chip experiment to validate (or disprove) the computer’s prediction.
“These human platforms allow us to look broad — exploring how therapies behave across populations — and look deep, engineering precise models that reflect an individual patient’s unique health profile,” Singh said.
The adaptability of NAMs gives researchers a more human-centered way to study — and hopefully one day treat — some of humanity’s most pervasive health problems, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, neurological disorders, infection, and more. Therapies developed using NAMs could be broad-use solutions that impact entire populations or tailored treatments for personalized healthcare. By bringing together strengths in engineering, computing, data science, and the life sciences, ETHOS positions Georgia Tech to help shape the future of NAMs research and technology development.
“The next generation of medical research increasingly relies on models that are both more human and more intelligent. Georgia Tech's strength lies in connecting the physical and digital worlds of biology,” Singh said. “That closed loop between human biology and computation gives us a powerful advantage in developing the next generation of non-animal models for research and drug development.”
The initiative will also include the development of a platform designed to connect researchers across the Institute and help them identify complementary expertise, shared experimental systems, and collaborative funding opportunities. The digital matchmaking system, along with pilot research and technology development, AI integration, grant development, and community building, makes ETHOS a potentially groundbreaking program launching at an opportune time.
“ETHOS is an initiative of convergence. Few institutions combine strengths in advanced human tissue systems, engineering, AI, and data science at the scale of Georgia Tech. ETHOS provides a framework to unite those capabilities and accelerate biomedical discovery and translation,” Singh said.
ETHOS is designed to strengthen connections between fundamental research and real-world health applications. By developing research models that more closely reflect human biology, the initiative could help researchers identify promising therapies earlier and better understand how they may perform in people. ETHOS could also strengthen collaborations among Atlanta's academic, clinical, and industry partners, creating new opportunities for translational research and technology development.
Before a promising new therapy can reach a patient, researchers need to answer a deceptively simple question: Will it work?
For decades, part of the answer has come from animal testing. Animal models have helped scientists make countless medical advances and understand how potential treatments behave in a living system. But they also present scientific and ethical challenges, including one unavoidable limitation: A mouse isn't a human. This limitation is one reason many promising drug candidates fail during human clinical trials.
Now, Georgia Tech is launching a new Institute-wide initiative focused on technologies that help researchers close that gap by studying human health and disease in ways that more closely reflect human biology.
Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience
]]>The Office of the Executive Vice President for Research and the Library invite the Georgia Tech community to help recognize that work at the sixth annual Georgia Tech Authors Celebration in Spring 2027.
To be included in this year's celebration, please submit book publications by Friday, Jan. 8, 2027. Submit publications here.
We are collecting information about books authored or edited by Georgia Tech employees and published between January 2025 and December 2026. Faculty and staff who authored or edited a book during that period, or who know a colleague who did, are encouraged to submit the book for consideration.
To help ensure the celebration reflects the full breadth of Georgia Tech scholarship, please submit each eligible title separately.
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.
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.
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.”
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:
Senior Communications Manager
Georgia Tech College of Computing
]]>“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.
]]>A Georgia Tech research team was recently recognized for an influential paper that helped define how applications could run efficiently outside the cloud.
The team received the 10-Year Test of Time Award at the 20th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems (DEBS 2026) in July.
Professor Umakishore Ramachandran and his former Ph.D. students – Enrique Saurez, Kirak Hong, Dave Lillethun, and Beate Ottenwälder – were recognized for their 2016 paper, Incremental Deployment and Migration of Geo-distributed Situation Awareness Applications in the Fog. Saurez, now a researcher at Microsoft, was the lead author of the paper.
Most of a person’s daily internet use, such as sending emails or shopping, runs through the cloud. Cloud computing does have latency issues, but this is typically not perceptible to people. However, in situation-awareness applications, such as virtual reality or autonomous vehicles, this latency becomes a barrier.
“Cloud computing is not appropriate for these latency-sensitive applications where events occur at computational perception speeds as opposed to human perception speeds. And this is the reason that edge computing became important,” Ramachandran said.
Rather than using the cloud, edge computing brings computation closer to the data source. This method reduces latency and backhaul bandwidth consumption. Beyond latency reduction, edge computing offers other advantages over the cloud. Businesses and organizations that handle confidential data may not want to store their records in the public cloud, and edge computing offers a more secure alternative.
The awarded paper proposed a new programming model, Foglets, that enables domain experts with limited knowledge of edge computing to run their applications on the geographically distributed edge infrastructure.
“We showed that with edge compute you can actually do some of the things that you need for situation awareness applications,” Ramachandran said.
“All of these students that I worked with on this paper have graduated and moved on to industry and academia and are doing great things, so it’s a nice honor to see something we did 10 years back get recognition.”
A Georgia Tech research team was recently recognized for an influential paper that helped define how applications could run efficiently outside the cloud.
The team received the 10-Year Test of Time Award at the 20th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems (DEBS 2026) in July.
Established in 2014, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program brings together distinguished faculty from across Georgia Tech to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, strengthen the sustainability research community, and advance the Institute's mission of generating real-world impact through research, education, and engagement. Serving three-year terms, fellows act as strategic advisors, community ambassadors, and thought leaders within the broader sustainability ecosystem. Building on this foundational vision, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program has evolved to meet the dynamic needs of modern sustainability leaders. The newly revamped program emphasizes active leadership development, offering tailored networking opportunities, connections with broader sustainability networks, and focused training to help fellows grow as influential voices in their respective fields. Through these enhancements, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program aims to empower early-career researchers to maximize their reach, elevate their research, and innovate transformative sustainability solutions.
The 2026 cohort represents a wide range of expertise spanning AI and sustainability, sustainable finance, computational materials discovery, infrastructure systems, environmental chemistry, urban resilience, and community-engaged research.
Collectively, their research addresses the sustainability of interconnected human, natural, and engineered systems, encompassing topics such as watershed resilience, resource stewardship, carbon cycling, circular materials management, and evidence-based environmental decision-making. Their diverse expertise fosters new interdisciplinary collaborations that accelerate the development of practical, scalable solutions for communities, industries, and ecosystems.
“We are delighted to welcome this exceptional group of faculty leaders to the BBISS community,” said BBISS Executive Director Beril Toktay. “Their expertise, creativity, and commitment to sustainability will help expand opportunities for collaboration and accelerate the impact of sustainability research across Georgia Tech and beyond.”
]]>The Tech Promise Scholarship, founded in 2007, makes it possible for Georgia students with family incomes below $55,500 to earn a debt-free degree from Georgia Tech. Weigel’s appointment as a faculty guide on the eve of the program’s 20th anniversary marks the first time a recipient of the scholarship has returned to the program in a mentorship capacity.
For Weigel, a senior academic professional in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences, the position is a full-circle moment:
Nobody gets to Tech by accident, but I know that for students who come from backgrounds similar to mine that it might not always feel that way. I’ve been keeping an eye out for this opportunity because I truly think it makes all the difference to have a broad support system and people who get where these students are coming.
Read Emily Weigel's story. >>>
]]>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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Communications Officer at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
]]>School of Computing Instruction (SCI) faculty member Nimisha Roy has been named director of online undergraduate initiatives, a new role created to expand online undergraduate programs and broaden access to computing education at Georgia Tech.
The position was made possible by philanthropic support from alumnus Henry Shi. A College of Computing Advisory Board member and longtime advocate for accessible online education, Shi has built a career around scaling technology to reach millions. He cofounded Snapcommerce, which has more than 30 million users. The College previously honored him with its Rising Star Award.
Shi said his motivation for supporting this new role stems from a belief that too many talented students are shut out of opportunity by barriers that have nothing to do with ability.
“I’ve seen firsthand how much talent is excluded from opportunities when cost, geography, and exclusivity are the gatekeepers,” he said. “This role is about widening the aperture to make a Top 10, world‑class undergraduate education far more accessible and affordable for students.”
Shi completed Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program in 2018. He says the experience shaped his view of what online learning can achieve.
“OMSCS has proven to the world that online education can deliver real rigor, excellence, and impact at scale without compromising quality,” he said. “It opened my eyes to the life‑changing impact higher education institutions can have at scale when access is treated as a first‑class goal.”
A Leader for the Next Phase of Online Undergraduate Growth
Roy brings more than eight years of experience at Georgia Tech, serving in roles ranging from graduate teaching assistant to faculty lecturer. She has taught in the Online Master of Analytics (OMSA) program and led research on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into computer science (CS) education.
This work included redesigning courses to use AI as a learning tool and benchmarking AI tools for software engineering tasks. She has also focused on improving accessibility in online computing courses, ensuring that materials support a wider range of learners.
In her new role, Roy will help bring the quality and rigor of Georgia Tech’s online graduate programs to the undergraduate level.
“A big part of the role is working with faculty to build these courses and making sure that what we offer online is just as strong as what students experience in person,” she said.
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Olufisayo Omojokun, who supervises the position, says the new role reflects the College’s commitment to expanding access to high-quality computing education at scale.
“As undergraduate programs continue to grow, this position will play a key role in strengthening student learning experiences and ensuring our curriculum remains rigorous, accessible, and responsive to emerging areas in computing like AI,” Omojokun said.
“With that said, it's important to remember that the undergraduate space also includes the College's dual enrollment offerings. Nimisha will play an important role across Georgia's many school districts, especially as we expand our AI literacy offerings.”
Interim Vice Provost for AI in Education David Joyner noted that perceptions of online learning have shifted significantly.
“When OMSCS started, there was a general belief that online education worked better for more experienced adults who could manage their own learning,” Joyner said. “But especially coming out of Covid, it’s been more and more clear that online education offers fantastic benefits for undergraduates as well.”
That shift has created momentum to expand online offerings beyond graduate education—momentum Roy is positioned to lead.
Early Priorities: Online Minors and Scalable Access
Roy’s first major initiative is starting online CS minors, which she sees as a practical way to make an immediate impact.
“We can reach a lot of students without having to build an entire degree from scratch,” she said.
She will continue teaching while serving in this leadership role, something she considers essential for staying connected to students’ day‑to‑day experiences.
Roy views online education as a powerful tool for expanding access for students who cannot relocate to Atlanta or enroll in a full-time program. She believes online learning can be more interactive, flexible, and personalized than traditional formats, especially in computing fields where practice and feedback are essential.
“Especially in computing, we can design systems that support that more intentionally,” she said.
Building for the Future: AI, Accessibility, and Opportunity
Roy is also exploring how AI tools can support accessibility and content-creation workflows by improving video and audio quality, generating and refining captions, and creating narrated tutorials from demonstrations. Her research focuses on how AI can make course materials more accessible across different learning styles, whether that’s presenting concepts in multiple ways, generating diverse examples, or supporting different learning styles.
Looking ahead, Roy hopes her work will expand access to a Georgia Tech education.
“There are so many bright, curious, and hardworking students who, for different reasons, aren’t able to be physically present on campus,” she said. “If we can give them access to the same level of rigor, support, and opportunity, that’s incredibly meaningful.”
Joyner sees this work as part of a broader reimagining of undergraduate computing education that uses online flexibility to reshape the timeline between education and employment.
“Our hope is to eventually make it so students can jumpstart their careers while still finishing their degrees because of the flexibility online classes give them,” he said.
School of Computing Instruction (SCI) faculty member Nimisha Roy has been named director of online undergraduate initiatives, a new role created to expand online undergraduate programs and broaden access to computing education at Georgia Tech.
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