ICYMI: Research Highlights from the Golisano College of Computing at RIT
December 2025 |
In this issue:
• Machine learning for mapping disease pathways
• Ph.D. dissertation honored for contributions to supercomputing
• New NSF REU opportunity in human-centered AI
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Rui Li earns $1.8 million NIH grant to advance discoveries in molecular networks |
At RIT, a new project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is using machine learning to map the full journey of illnesses and discover entirely new disease pathways. If successful, the RIT research could transform how scientists understand disease and speed the discovery of new drugs and treatments for some of today’s most pressing health challenges.
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Ph.D. graduate's dissertation honored for contributions to supercomputing at ACM SIGHPC
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Dr. Avinash Maurya, a recent computing and information sciences Ph.D graduate has been recognized with the 2025 ACM SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention award, for his dissertation, "Scalable Access-Pattern Aware I/O Acceleration and Multi-Tiered Data Management for HPC and AI Workloads." The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of High-Performance Computing (HPC), and is awarded based on the significance of the research contribution, the potential impact on theory and practice, and overall quality of work.
Maurya's research has already contributed to production-grade projects at Argonne National Laboratory, Saudi Aramco, and Microsoft DeepSpeed.
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iSchool faculty and students organize, present at 2025 ACM Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) Conference |
Kristen Shinohara, associate professor in the School of Information served as the co-general chair responsible for running this year's international ACM ASSETS conference. She was joined by Matt Huenerfauth, the Dean of the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, who serves as Chair of SIGACCESS, the sponsoring ACM SIG of the conference. RIT was represented at the conference by multiple faculty from the college's iSchool, who served in additional leadership roles.
Shinohara was the recent recipient of an award from the National Science Foundation for her research project "Bridging the Accessibility Skills Gap: Connecting Industry and Computing Faculty for the Adoption of Evidence-Based Teaching of Accessibility."
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Applicants wanted for NSF-supported summer research opportunities over the next three years |
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RESEARCH NEWS IN BRIEF: WINTER 2025
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Wang awarded five-year grant from NIH and endowed professorship
Linwei Wang, newly named Bruce B. Bates Professor in the computing and information sciences Ph.D. program, was awarded a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a hybrid artificial intelligence system for treating scar-mediated ventricular tachycardia (VT). The award, which builds on her previous NIH-funded research, will support the development of a hybrid neural-physics AI system designed to accurately model and identify the three-dimensional construct of the VT's reentrant circuit beneath the heart's surface.
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| Cybersecurity faculty publish new book Fake-Checking: A Journalist's Guide to Deepfakes
Christopher Schwartz, research scientist in the Department of Cybersecurity, and Matthew Wright, O’Sullivan Professor and chair of the Department of Cybersecurity, along with Andrea Hickerson, former director of RIT's School of Communication and current dean of the School of Journalism and New Media at University of Mississippi, published the book Fake-Checking: A Journalist’s Guide to Deepfakes.
It serves as a practical reference for journalists and advanced media students who are increasingly required to identify and verify potential deepfakes and their future iterations.
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| Ph.D. student presents novel AI explainability research at NeurIPS
Dipkamal Bhusal, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, presented four pieces of work at the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation Conference on Dec. 4 in San Diego. Showcasing his research in explainability, interpretability, and their applications in reliable AI is a novel framework for FACE (Faithful Automatic Concept Extraction), which uncovers the specific, trustworthy concepts that an AI model is using to make its final decision. This research is a crucial step forward in making sophisticated AI applications more transparent, trustworthy, and ready for real-world deployment.
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KhudaBukhsh honored for contributions to NLP
Ashique KhudaBukhsh, assistant professor in the Department of Software Engineering, was recognized with the Outstanding Senior Area Chair Award at the 30th annual Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, in Suzhou, China. KhudaBukhsh was among nine chairs selected from a group of 168 for the honor, which recognizes his service to the research community.
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| | Schwartz and Weeden discuss gamifying cybersecurity for understanding critical infrastructure security at VDS
David Schwartz, Director of the School of Interactive Games and Media, and Chad Weeden, Director of Esports and RIT's Cyber Range, were a part of the panel “Cybersecurity and Defense: Strategies for Critical Infrastructure in an Interconnected World” at this year's VDS in Valencia, Spain.
VDS is one of Europe’s most prominent international tech events.
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| Mohammed Eshan '24: Founder, GhostEye |
Following his work at BlackRock, Eshan was accepted into Y Combinator's Y2025 batch, where he launched his new company, GhostEye.
GhostEye helps companies with human security by simulating attack paths with emphasis on social engineering tactics that bypass their security stack, from initial contact to system compromise.
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