Newsletter December 2025

By the numbers:

70+ AWARE-AI trainees
50+ research publications
15 trainees at NRT+ Summits
9 trainee seed funding awards
9 trainee national lab research internships
6 PhD alumni with positions in academia or industry

Photo of three trainees working together in the fall hackathon.

Photo: Graduate students and AWARE-AI trainees Anisa Callis, Connor Liu, and Stephanie Patterson working together at the Fall 2025 AWARE-AI hackathon.

Message from the Director

Dear AWARE-AI Community,

December greetings from AWARE-AI! We are thrilled to share recent happenings and updates from the AWARE-AI program with you in this newsletter.

Together with Gallaudet University’s team led by Raja Kushalnagar, we are part of a new inter-institutional initiative, Universal AI. Funded by the NSF, this major grant award will establish new traineeship experiences and resources focused on AI, while meaningfully building on the AWARE-AI framework. We are looking forward to welcoming the initial cohort of Gallaudet graduate students to conduct AI research at RIT in Summer 2026, and we are excited about strengthening collaborations with Gallaudet in AI research and graduate training through Universal AI.

In addition, several of our AWARE-AI trainees have experienced outstanding achievements this past year. In May, many trainees graduated, among them Saurav Singh. We are delighted that Saurav was selected as the PhD graduate to speak at the RIT Doctoral Hooding Ceremony in May. Dr. Singh will soon return to speak at our annual four-day conference, the 2026 AWARE-AI Winter Symposium, which takes place from January 13 to January 16, 2026. He will share virtually about his journey toward an industry career, while another PhD graduate, Dr. Emily Kuang, will share about her journey toward a tenure-track position in academia. We are also proud of PhD student trainees Cedric Bone and Sophia Caruana, who completed summer research internships at the 711th Human Performance Wing of the Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH. Additionally, we remain incredibly grateful for the many research experiences AWARE-AI trainees have benefited from at AFRL/Griffiss Institute in Rome, NY.

In the NRT+ research network alliance, which we launched with partners at Clemson University (CU), Cleveland State University (CSU), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM), we held NRT+ Summits this year at CU-ICAR in Greenville, SC, and at CSU in Cleveland, OH. Several AWARE-AI trainees and faculty attended each summit. With our NRT+ partners, we are now in advanced stages of preparing for the next NRT+ Summit at UWM in March, which will enable trainees and faculty to expand research collaborations alongside partners.

AWARE-AI is also contributing to synergies in other initiatives. To provide a few examples: First, thanks to our affiliation with the Center for Human-aware AI (CHAI), AWARE-AI trainees participate in the CHAI AI research seminar series. The Fall 2025 series included, for example, a well-attended plenary talk by Mark Riedl from Georgia Tech, and in Spring 2026, trainee Calvin Nau will deliver an Advanced PhD Student Talk on March 30. Second, we want to recognize four trainees (Calvin Nau, Emily Rooney, Jadeline Miao, and Liam Ryan), who were selected as International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) Scholars and participated in research focused on AI and Industry 5.0 at University West, hosted by Thomas Pederson and colleagues. Third, this summer, AWARE-AI will facilitate near-peer interactions between PhD trainees and REU participants from the REU Site on Computational Sensing for Human-centered AI.

Finally, AWARE-AI is now accepting applications from RIT graduate students for its fifth cohort, which will begin the traineeship year in August. Applications and recommendation letters are due on March 1, 2026. Students will have the opportunity to participate in AI research tracks and around a dozen career-advancing training elements, promoting careers in AI. In addition, two of the other initiatives mentioned above, the REU Site and the IRES program, are also accepting applications by February 15, 2026, and March 15, 2026, respectively. Please help us spread the word.

On behalf of our team, I wish you joyful holidays!

Cissi

A group of men and women stand on a flight of stairs smiling up at the camera

Photo: Members of the inter-institutional Universal AI team. Front row: Raja Kushalnagar (Lead PI, Gallaudet), Jamison Heard (RIT). Second row: Christian Vogler (Co-PI, Gallaudet), Esa Rantanen (RIT), Cecilia Alm (Co-PI and RIT Lead). Third row: Angie Armstrong (Project Coordinator, RIT), Charmaine Mendonsa (Project Coordinator, Gallaudet). Not pictured: Reynold Bailey (Co-PI, RIT) and Ferat Sahin (RIT). Photo: Carlos Ortiz, University Photographer, RIT.

Explore AWARE-AI at RIT

Select Achievements

Research track lead Ferat Sahin was recognized with the Outstanding Contribution Award from the IEEE SMC Society at IEEE SMC 2025.
Trainee Viet Dung Nguyen presented at the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (ICRA) 2025 Conference.
Research track co-lead Alex Ororbia was awarded tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences' Department of Computer Science.
AWARE-AI trainee and Cognitive Science PhD student Sophia Caruana co-mentored two undergraduate students through the Computing Research Association's Undergraduate to PhD (UR2PhD) program.

Trainee Spotlights

Cedric Bone

Cedric Bone is a Ph.D. student in Computing and Information Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). He studies human-computer interaction and AI in the Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (CLaSP) Lab, advised by Cecilia Alm. His work examines how humans interact with intelligent systems, including studying cognitive load and synchrony in human-AI collaboration. As an AWARE-AI trainee, he has gained international research experience at ML-Labs in Dublin and developed an interdisciplinary approach to creating responsible, human-aware AI technologies. Prior to joining RIT, Cedric earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University at Buffalo, where he conducted research with virtual reality applications for security evaluation. His interdisciplinary research aims to create AI systems that are not only technologically advanced but also intuitive, accessible, and trustworthy for users. Cedric has also completed two research internships at AFRL in New York and in Ohio, respectively, and he has served as a graduate teaching assistant.

Calvin Nau

Calvin Nau is a Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Ph.D. student advised by Katie McConky. Calvin's research focuses on the intersection of combinatorial optimization and machine learning. His work in AWARE-AI has included several application areas, such as optimizing live-donor kidney transplant plans and interpretable modeling of human temporal awareness. In addition to working with his own advisor, an AWARE-AI affiliate, Calvin has collaborated with several AWARE-AI faculty mentors, including Cecilia Alm, Reynold Bailey, Ali Baheri, and Esa Rantanen. Calvin has been an IRES scholar (and he is happy to answer any questions about the program), researching AI-supported quality signatures. Outside of RIT, he works at CUBRC, a local non-profit defense research company, in the Data Science and Information Fusion division.

Faculty Spotlights

Katie McConky

Katie McConky is Department Head and Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where she leads initiatives that integrate advanced analytics, optimization, and machine learning to solve complex problems in energy systems, transportation, healthcare, and large-scale decision-making. Her research focuses on combining traditional operations research techniques with modern AI approaches to address challenges in forecasting, resource allocation, and combinatorial optimization, with applications spanning energy efficiency, smart grids, and kidney exchange.

Katie McConky’s work has been supported by leading organizations including DARPA, NASA, ONR, NYSERDA, and the Department of the Air Force, and she has collaborated internationally on projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving energy sustainability. She holds two patents in cyberattack forecasting and remote activity detection and has published extensively in high-impact journals such as Journal of Cleaner Production, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, and Transportation Research Part C.

Prior to joining RIT, she served as Lead Data Scientist for TROVE Predictive Data Science, focusing heavily on novel applications for smart meter data including energy theft detection, demand response event forecasting, and energy efficiency marketing campaign optimization. She earned her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from SUNY Buffalo, and is a proud alumni of the RIT Industrial Engineering program for her BS and MS degrees.

Hakyung Sung

Hakyung Sung joined the faculty of the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2025, where she serves as an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Departments of Psychology and Modern Languages. Before joining RIT, she earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics and M.S. in Computer Science (concurrent degree) from the University of Oregon. During her graduate studies, she gained research and teaching experience in corpus linguistics, second language acquisition, and natural language processing. She also completed research internships at ETS, where she contributed to projects on language assessment and computational modeling of learner language.

Hakyung Sung’s research lies at the intersection of applied linguistics and computational linguistics, focusing on how linguistic constructions emerge and vary across first and second language use. She develops annotated learner corpora and applies NLP techniques to investigate the lexicogrammatical complexity of language production. Her recent work explores how large language models can be leveraged to extract argument structure constructions from second language English speaking and writing data, and how these features can be used to measure linguistic complexity.

At RIT, she hopes to continue research initiatives that bridge corpus-based language analysis and AI-driven linguistic modeling, fostering collaborations across psychology, linguistics, and computer science. Her long-term goal is to advance integrative, data-driven approaches that deepen our understanding of second language speakers use language, while improving the interpretability and educational applicability of computational language models.

News

NRT+ Summit at Clemson University

a young man stands in front of a project screen while speaking to an audience

Photo: AWARE-AI trainee Cedric Bone presents his group's research pitch to the audience at the CU-ICAR NRT+ Summit.

On Sunday, March 9, 2025, four AWARE-AI trainees and four RIT faculty members traveled to Clemson University's International Center for Automotive Research Information (CU-ICAR) in Greenville, SC. This was the second NRT+ Summit (the first was held at RIT in Fall 2024), between four universities with an NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program (RIT, Clemson University, Cleveland State University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison) that had formed a partnership to build on their successes in the NRT programs.

The next three days were filled with summit programming. Representatives from each university presented updates from their teams, and participants benefited from a keynote address by K. C. Wang, a discussion with panelists from industry, national labs, and academia, and a panel on industry vs. academic vs. government careers. Students also formed inter-institutional trainee teams to compete in a research commercialization challenge, with time to work on their proposals. They then presented their pitches to the summit participants.

AWARE-AI Trainee Calvin Nau stands between Laine Mears of Clemson University and Cecilia Alm of RIT after winning Best 3M presentation

Photo: Laine Mears, PI for Clemson University's THINKER program, and Cecilia Alm, Director of AWARE-AI, present AWARE-AI trainee Calvin Nau with the award for Best 3-Minute Presentation during the NRT+ Summit hosted at Clemson University's CU-ICAR campus.

While the students were working in teams, faculty gathered together to work on proposal development to build on the NRT+ reserach network alliance. We also enjoyed very interesting tours to the ICAR campus, labs, and facilities, and also to the nearby BMW group manufacturing plant in Spartanburg, SC.

Photo: The NRT+ Summit attendees visited the BMW Group Manufacturing Plant in Spartanburg, SC.

Imagine RIT 2025

a yellow four-legged robot poses in front of an AWARE-AI Poster

Photo: Boston Dynamics' Spot robot poses in front of the AWARE-AI exhibit.

At Imagine RIT 2025 in April, AWARE-AI showcased projects from each research track: a robotic arm, a real-time, computer vision-based emotion recognition algorithm, a mobile robot base, and the NASA Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB). Visiting community members experienced each of these exhibits hands-on, which elevated the experience. Additionally, trainee Saurav Singh and research track lead Jamison Heard took the Boston Dynamics Spot robot on a walk around campus, and Spot even stopped by the AWARE-AI exhibit. One of the most memorable moments was when kids wanted to pet the robot dog.

AWARE-AI Celebrates 2025 Graduates

AWARE-AI trainees, faculty, and staff gathered in May to recognize the graduating students who had completed the AWARE-AI traineeship, in addition to their PhD or MS degree programs, including Arianna Giguere, Chris Ding, Liya Thomas (a December graduate), Paras Jain, Raghunandan Ramadass, and Saurav Singh. Khushi Dhar also completed this milestone in the summer. Alumni remain connected to the AWARE-AI community in various ways, including as presenters at the AWARE-AI Onboarding Bootcamp or the AWARE-AI Winter Symposium, or as part of the AWARE-AI research community and network.

Photo: Paras Jain (MS in AI), Saurav Singh (ECE PhD), and Chris Ding (MS in CS) were recognized for completing their AWARE-AI traineeships, in addition to graduating from their degree programs.

AWARE-AI Keynote Speaker Tesca Fitzgerald Inspires Further Robot Dialogue

Tesca Fitzgeral poses with a robot arm draped over their shoulders

Photo: AWARE-AI Onboarding Bootcamp keynote speaker Tesca Fitzgerald, Yale University, poses with a robot arm.

AWARE-AI held its 2025 Onboarding Bootcamp event in August and invited Tesca Fitzgerald to present as keynote speaker. AWARE-AI and the broader RIT community learned about how robots’ reason about novel scenarios (objects, tasks, and interactions) during her keynote. Tesca is an Assistant Professor at Yale University and is world-renowned within the human-robotic interaction field. This depth of knowledge was greatly displayed during the talk, as Tesca delved into the intricate facets of robot learning, outside of large foundation models that are becoming more prevalent. After her talk, there was a line of students and faculty alike waiting to ask questions, demonstrating the impact the keynote speaker had on her audience. This talk also accelerated the robotics dialogue on campus and sparked new ideas about how to create truly social empathetic physically embodied AI agents.

Former RIT SCOB Faculty Leads AWARE-AI Workshop on Collaborative Research

In September, Joy Olabisi, former RIT Saunders College of Business faculty member and now Assistant Vice Provost for Graduate Education at Georgia Tech, facilitated a virtual workshop for AWARE-AI trainees on Teamwork and Collaborative Research. The attendees participated in a case study involving team dynamics in a fictional company, which sparked lively and engaging discussions as the scenario unfolded.

While at RIT, Joy Olabisi was an Associate Professor of Management and served as Director of the M.S. and B.S. in Global Supply Chain Management programs.

Part II of the Teamwork and Collaborative Research workshop will take place in March 2026.

2025-2026 AWARE-AI Trainee Council

Each academic year, a four-member Trainee Council is selected from incoming and current cohorts of trainees. Serving on the Trainee Council (TC) provides AWARE-AI trainees with an opportunity to gain expeirence with service, leadership, and consensus decision-making.

As an example, the TC members are charged with planning most of the last day of the annual AWARE-AI Winter Symposium, bringing in guest speakers and coordinating an educational team-building activity for trainees to close out the four-day event. TC also plans for other team-building, career-enhancing, or research-focused activities throughout the academic year. In 2025, AWARE-AI issued a call for volunteers to serve on the Trainee Council, and several trainees responded. An election was held to determine the four trainees who would serve for the 2025-2026 academic year. Congratulations to Grant Bosworth, Mohammad Raees, Ajay Gopi, and Chirayu Salgarkar!

graphic showing headshots of members of trainee council, from left Grant Bosworth, Mohammad Raees, Ajay Gopi, and Chirayu Salgarkar

Words From the TC:

We are excited to contribute to the RIT community in creating spaces for socializing and enrichment. We hope to create events to help students grow their peer networks while exploring some of the amazing sights Rochester has to offer. Upcoming activities include museum trips, graduate socials, industry tours, and more.

NRT+ Summit at CSU

Cleveland State University’s Human-Machine Systems program hosted the third NRT+ Summit at CSU on September 24-26, 2025, with guests from Clemson University (CU), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM), and RIT. After welcome remarks by Brian Davis, CSU’s Dean of the College of Engineering, and CSU Provost Nigamanth Sridhar, the first day included a keynote on quantum computing by Chansu Yu, followed by a presentation by Patty Stoddard Dare on AI in healthcare. The attending trainees from the NRT+ partners also participated in a lightning debate challenge organized and moderated by Vinita Jansari (CU) and Angelique Armstrong (RIT), after which CSU students Erin Clark and Skye Carlson led a tour of the Center for Human-Machine Systems.

The second day began with research updates from the NRT+ PIs. Cecilia Alm was joined virtually by Gallaudet University's Raja Kushalnagar, Christian Vogler, and Charmaine Mendonsa to introduce Universal AI, the new traineeship partnership between RIT and Gallaudet, to the NRT+ community. Later, NRT+ trainees participated in a RePlay for Kids adaptive interactive toy build activity facilitated by Kelle DeBoth Foust (CSU) and Natalie Wardega. Kristie Schultz (UWM) provided a preview of the next NRT+ Summit, hosted by UWM’s INTEGRATE in Madison, WI, in March 2026. After visiting the TransDigm Advanced Manufacturing Center's open house, Summit attendees split into two groups for memorable educational field trips: one group visited the NASA Glenn Research Center, and the other the Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute.

Four people stand in front of a screen while others look on seated at round tables

Photo: Trainee Lightning Debates. Bea Pulido (RIT) and her team argue their position while Grant Bosworth (RIT) and his team prepare.

The final day was a combined NRT+ and Center for Human-Machine Systems (CHMS) event, with a keynote, a panel with Q&A discussion, several research presentations, and a breakout session titled Needs Across the Lifespan. Brian Davis took to the podium one last time for some closing remarks, and the community also celebrated the winners and runners up for the Lightning Debate Challenge. There was a tie for first place between a team with Erin Clark (CSU), Kareemat Melaiye (CSU), Jack Zupfer (UWM), and Grant Bosworth (RIT), and another team comprising Cedric Bone (RIT), Lucinda Duncan (CSU), Cecilia Delgado Solorzano (Clemson), and Will Townsend (UWM).

We are now planning for the NRT+ Summit to be hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 23-25, 2026.

Some RIT attendees at the NRT+ Summit at CSU

Photo: Some of the RIT trainees and faculty at the CSU NRT+ Summit.

Spotlight on Research Track: Update on AI Software

The AI Software Research Track of the AWARE-AI program focuses on advancing the algorithmic and software foundations needed for human-aware, adaptive, and trustworthy AI systems. Research in this track spans machine learning, computational modeling, multi-agent systems, and affective computing, with an emphasis on robustness, personalization, fairness, and continual adaptation in real-world settings.

Over the past year, the track has seen significant trainee and faculty accomplishments, including multiple PhD dissertation and proposal defenses, peer-reviewed publications and submissions, invited presentations, and national and international research internships. Notably, a recent PhD graduate has transitioned to an industry research role, several trainees presented work at major venues such as ICRA 2025, and others were selected for competitive international research and mentoring programs. Faculty leadership has also grown, with new center-level roles, NSF REU funding, industry-sponsored research awards, and large collaborative NSF proposals currently under review.

Current research efforts in the AI Software track address both foundational and applied challenges. New projects explore robotic mediation in competitive and collaborative environments or methods for handling nonstationarity in multi-agent reinforcement learning. Ongoing work includes optimizing fairness in kidney exchange systems, modeling synchrony in human-AI agent interactions across display modalities, biomimetic machine intelligence for neurorobotic control, training strategies for ensuring robustness under unreliable multimodal signals, and balancing personalization and generalization in machine learning and affective AI. Together, these efforts provide critical software capabilities that support the broader AWARE-AI vision of human-centered, reliable, and impactful AI systems.

Spotlight on Select Spring and Fall 2025 Events

Esa Rantanen and Rob Spenceley pose in front of posters at HFES conference.

Photo: AWARE-AI research track lead Esa Rantanen and UWM INTEGRATE trainee Robert Spenceley both presented in the HFES 2025 poster session.

Research track lead Esa Rantanen had several publications featured at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society's (HFES) 2025 Annual Meeting.
Research track lead Reynold Bailey visited the School of Science, Computing, and Artificial Intelligence at the University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus.
Trainees presented on their work to the Senior Vice President, Data, Analytics, and AI of Paychex, during an RIT visit.
Trainee Rajesh Titung, RIT, and his peer Faithful Chiagoziem Onwuegbuche, ML-Labs/UCD, were the first authors of a journal article published in IEEE Access.

Participants in the Fall 2025 Hackathon gather for a group photo

Photo: Student participants in the AWARE-AI Fall 2025 hackathon with faculty organizers Ferat Sahin and Bing Yan.

Explore AWARE-AI at RIT