Newsmakers

Highlighting the professional and academic accomplishments of College of Computing and Information Sciences students, faculty, and staff.

Newsmakers are a quick and easy way to acknowledge the professional and academic accomplishments of RIT students, faculty, and staff, such as publishing an article in a scholarly journal, presenting research at a conference, serving on a panel discussion, earning a scholarship, or winning an award. Newsmakers appear in News and Events as well as the "In the News" section on faculty/staff directory profile pages.

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November 2026

  • November 12, 2026

    Lydia Klecan '26 (computer science), and Carlos R. Rivero, associate professor of computer science, presented "Micro vs. Macro Averaging for Link Prediction Evaluation in Knowledge Graphs," at the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. The paper presents an empirical study of micro and macro averaging for link prediction evaluation in knowledge graphs.

  • November 11, 2026

    Sherin Navin Thomas and Abdul Aleem Shaik Gadda, computing and information sciences Ph.D. students, presented research at the IEEE JCM 2026 meeting on Oct. 27 in Rochester, N.Y. Navin Thomas discussed validating large language models for neurological care, and Shaik Gadda presented a data-driven characterization of brain activity preceding epileptic events. Their work explores how AI can support clinicians in seizure prediction, surgery planning, and medication adjustment.

  • November 11, 2026

    Noah Baumgaertel, a fourth-year political science and industrial design student, and Divya Ramjee, assistant professor of criminal justice, presented “AI Tools and Sentencing Decisions: Analysis of Pennsylvania Sentencing Data for Legal Financial Obligations” at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management conference on Nov. 7. Co-authored with Ashique KhudaBukhsh, assistant professor of software engineering, and Sreeja Reddy Bobbili, a data science graduate student, the paper uses Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing data to assess the accuracy of AI tools for judges and examine technical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding their use in sentencing.

  • November 4, 2026

    Jack McLaughlin '26 MS (computer science) presented “TurnStyle: Suggesting Style Prompts for Instruction-Guided Text-to-Speech Using Bimodal Dialogue Contexts” at the Speech and Audio Language Models Workshop at the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. The work was co-authored with Cecilia Alm, professor of psychology and artificial intelligence program director.

October 2026

  • October 30, 2026

    Sanzida Mojib Luna, a Ph.D. student in computing and information sciences, presented “Accessibility in Extended Reality,” a systematic review of 245 ACM Digital Library publications from 2000 to 2025 on the design, evaluation, use, and education related to computing for people with disabilities and older adults. Mojib Luna also presented “Exploring How Purpose of Activities Shapes Older Adults’ Engagement with Extended Reality,” which reports findings from a six-week study with three older adults, comparing XR activities centered on exercise and entertainment to explore how their purpose shaped participants’ experiences of effort, difficulty, and enjoyment, at ACM ASSETS 2026. Kristen Shinohara and Garreth Tigwell, associate professors in the School of Information, Konstantinos Papangelis, associate professor of interactive games and media, and Jiangnan Xu, postdoctoral human-computer interaction researcher, co-authored the papers.

  • October 19, 2026

    Fengran Mo, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Cyril Weerasooriya '24 (computer science) co-authored “StaRPO: Stability-Augmented Reinforcement Policy Optimization” with peers from other universities. The paper, which was accepted to this year's Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, explains StaRPO, a stability-augmented reinforcement learning framework that explicitly incorporates reasoning stability into the optimization objective.

  • October 14, 2026

    Dave Schwartz, professor of interactive games and media, served on the program committee and presented “Gamifying Disaster Chaplaincy: An Interactive Workshop on Designing Crisis Spiritual Care Mechanics” at the inaugural Disaster Gaming Conference, Oct. 8-10. Schwartz presented a future roadmap for a disaster game engine focused on critical infrastructure, based on his work with Jessica Bayliss and Brian Tomaszewski, both professors of interactive games and media; The Army Cyber Institute's Jack Voltaic; RIT MAGIC Spell Studios; and the ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute. 

     

  • October 12, 2026

    Jaiaid Mobin, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, received the Best Student Paper award at eScience'26 for “Discover, Then Diversify: Phase-Aware Control of Tree-of-Thought Search.” The publication was a collaboration with RIT’s High Performance Distributed Systems Laboratory and the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Mobin works under M. Mustafa Rafique, associate professor of computer science.

  • October 12, 2026

    Christopher Homan, associate professor of computer science, co-authored “Global PIQA: Evaluating Commonsense Reasoning Across 100+ Languages and Cultures.” The paper, co-written by associates of RIT's Lab for Population Intelligence, was accepted to this year’s Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.