ICYMI: Research Highlights from the Golisano College of Computing at RIT
July 2026 |
In this issue:
• ML model security research earns NSF CAREER Award
• Securing personal data in AI agents
• RIT CS student helps take down one of the "most powerful cyberweapons ever assembled."
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Weijie Zhao earns NSF CAREER Award to defend AI models from attackers |
Weijie Zhao, an assistant professor of computer science at RIT, wants to shine a light on AI design and make sure that machine learning models are not embedded with hidden vulnerabilities or dangerous exploits. His research will help build machine learning models that are more secure and interpretable.
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RIT computing researchers are fusing physics and AI to transform healthcare |
Experts in the Computational Biomedicine Laboratory. are developing physics-integrated digital twins of patients’ organs, including the heart and the liver. Building these AI-enhanced mirrors requires a careful merging of physics-based models and neural networks, called hybrid AI.
This pioneering approach is led by Linwei Wang, the Bruce B. Bates Endowed Professor in Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. Her research has been supported by more than $10 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.
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From The Wall Street Journal: The College Student -- and His Cat Meme -- Who Hunted the World's Biggest Cyberweapon |
Benjamin Brundage, a fourth-year computer science student, made front-page news for helping take down one of the most powerful cyberweapons ever assembled. And he’s been running his own startup at the same time.
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New privacy tool helps detect when AI agents become double agents |
Privacy experts at RIT are studying what happens to personal data when an AI agent starts doing tasks, in an effort to make AI agents more accountable.
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Dr. José P. Zagal named Director of the School of Interactive Games and Media |
José P. Zagal has been named Director of the School of Interactive Games and Media (IGM) at RIT. Professor Zagal has edited and authored numerous books and articles on game ethics, games education, game design, role-playing games, and more. He most recently co-authored Seeing Red: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy (MIT Press 2024) and co-edited Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons (MIT Press 2024) and The Routledge Handbook of Role-Playing Game Studies (Routledge 2024).
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RESEARCH NEWS IN BRIEF: SUMMER 2026
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RIT computing researchers abound at ACM CHI 2026
RIT had 18 total accepted contributions for ACM CHI 2026, with 8 arriving from the Digital Twins Interaction Lab (4 full papers, 3 posters, and a journal article), including a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award for computing and information sciences Ph.D. student Muhammad Raees' “Evaluating How People Appropriately Rely on AI.”
The accepted work spans human-AI decision making, AI-assisted interactive storytelling, multimodal conversational search, trust in location-based games, and more.
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| CS faculty earn NSF award for advancing NeuroAI
Richard Lange, assistant professor, and Alexander Ororbia, associate professor, both in the Department of Computer Science, received a new award from the National Science Foundation for their project “Advancing NeuroAI through Biologically-Plausible Self-supervised Learning.” Both faculty members' research bridges neuroscience and AI, with Ororbia leading the Neural Adaptive Computing Laboratory at RIT.
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Haibo Yang, assistant professor of computing and information sciences, and Zhiqiang Tao, assistant professor in the School of Information, received awards from NVIDIA’s Academic Grant program. Yang’s project, Federated Edge AI for Personalized In-Home Heart Failure Monitoring, was recognized for research into how federated learning and edge AI can enable privacy-preserving, personalized health monitoring at home, allowing AI models to learn from distributed data without moving sensitive patient information off-device.
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Ye Zheng, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, along with Assistant Professor Yidan Hu and Professor Sumita Mishra from the Department of Cybersecurity, received top honors at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. Their 2026 paper, “Quantifying Classifier Utility under Local Differential Privacy,” was honored with the Best Student Paper Award. The group also received the Best Artifact Runner-Up Award, recognizing code or data associated with a research paper, for their 2025 work “Optimal Piecewise-based Mechanism for Collecting Bounded Numerical Data under Local Differential Privacy.”
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SE researcher Ashique KhudaBukhsh develops HAUNT framework for evaluating how AI models respond to pressure
Writing for The Conversation, Ashique KhudaBukhsh, assistant professor in the Department of Software Engineering, examines how conversational pressure can cause AI chatbots to accept and reinforce false information, revealing vulnerabilities in large language models.
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Liangxiao Zhu '03: Vice President of Engineering, DoorDash |
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Liangxiao Zhu ’03 (computer science) recently provided a generous gift to name the Liangxiao Zhu Tutoring Center at RIT's College of Computing, a space dedicated to academic support, collaboration, and student success.
Zhu has held numerous senior leadership roles at Meta and Microsoft in the Pacific Northwest, and is currently Vice President of Engineering at DoorDash. At Meta, Zhu launched and led high profile projects that included Facebook Pay and Donation, as well as systems for Facebook Ads and Creators.
At DoorDash, she is leading teams of engineers on new and emerging products that include DoorDash's new Shopping Agent.
Thank you, Liangxiao for your commitment to the next generation of computing leaders!
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