Each edition of Research Bytes showcases the scholarly and professional achievements of Drexel School of Computer and Information Sciences (SCIS) faculty and students.
Research Accomplishments
Recent Grant Awards
Information Science Assistant Professor Afsaneh Razi, PhD received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in the amount of $681,393 over five years. The proposal is titled “CAREER: Investigating, Designing, Developing, and Evaluating Solutions to Prevent Adolescent Overattachment to Conversational AI Companions.” Learn more about Razi’s NSF award.
Honors & Recognition
Information Science Associate Professor Alex Poole, PhD received the 2026 Rising Star Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Data and Information Science. This award honors recent graduates who have demonstrated exceptional growth and meaningful contributions to the field and the community.
Information Science Professor Jane Greenberg, PhD received the Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR) 2025 Distinguished Recognition Award for her vision, leadership, and sustained commitment to the metadata and semantics research community. The award was presented by Prof. Emmanouel Garoufallou (MTSR Chair) during the 19th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR 2025), which took place in Thessaloniki, Greece last December.
Xizhi Tan, a Computer Science PhD graduate (June 2025), received the ACM SIGecom 2025 Doctoral Dissertation Award (Honorary Mention) for her PhD thesis titled “Learning-Augmented Mechanism Design.” Tan completed her dissertation research under the supervision of Vasilis Gkatzelis, PhD.
Congratulations to Kevin Shi and Ashley Phan, SCIS BS in Data Science (BSDS) majors, and their advisor Hegler Tissot, PhD for taking first place in Research at the SCIS Senior Design Showcase for their project SCALED Choices for Clinical Outcome Prediction.
Congratulations also to Abby Hatcher, a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics, and Mark Boady, PhD for taking second place in Research at the SCIS Senior Design Showcase for their project Particle Physics Kalman Filter Implementation. Read more about the showcase.
Congratulations to all recipients of research awards at the 2026 Honors Ceremony, held on June 2, 2026:
- Marius Andrei Stefan Garbea (Computer Science Department Jay Modi Memorial Award presented annually to a CS PhD student)
- Ramtin Ehsani (Computer Science Department Outstanding Graduate Research Award)
- Matt Namvarpour (Information Science Department Outstanding Research Assistant Award)
- Wendy Khoo (Award for PhD Research Excellence)
- Preetha Chatterjee, PhD (Award for Faculty Research Excellence)
- Alex Poole, PhD (Award for Faculty Research Excellence).
Learn more information about the School’s Awards program.
Recent Publications & Conference Participation
* Drexel authors indicated in bold
Josh Ascher and Vasilis Gkatzelis, with co-authors Eric Balkanski and Jason Chatzitheodorou, had a paper “Online Min-Cost Matching Beyond One-Sided Arrivals” accepted to the 27th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC ‘26), July 2026.
Elham Aghakhani and Rezvaneh Rezapour had a paper “Like a Therapist, but Not: Reddit Narratives of AI in Mental Health Contexts” accepted to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL ‘26), to be published in Findings, July 2026.
Elham Aghakhani and Rezavaneh Rezapour had a paper “Understanding User Narratives of AI for Mental Health Support on Reddit” accepted to the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 ‘26), to be published in Extended Abstracts, July 2026.
Layla Bouzoubaa, Elham Aghakhani, and Rezavaneh Rezapour had a paper “Phenotypes of Stigma Expressed by People Who Use Drugs on Reddit” accepted to the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 ‘26), to be published in Extended Abstracts, July 2026.
Arijit Chakma, Tiffany D. Do, and Feng Liu, with co-authors Peng He, Zeyuan Wang, Honglu Liu, and Tingting Li, had a paper “DrawSim-PD: Simulating Student Science Drawings to Support NGSS-Aligned Teacher Diagnostic Reasoning” accepted to the 27th International Conference on AI in Education (AIED '26), July 2026.
Erdong Chen, Yuyang Ji, and Feng Liu, with co-authors Jacob K. Greenberg, Benjamin Steel, Faraz Arkam, Abigail Lewis, and Pranay Singh, had a paper “BioGait-VLM: A Tri-Modal Vision-Language-Biomechanics Framework for Interpretable Clinical Gait Assessment” accepted to the 27th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI ‘26), September/October 2026.
Hyung Wook Choi and Mat Kelly had a paper “From Detection to Documentation: A Provenance-Aware Framework for Semantic Evolution” accepted to the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DCMI ‘26), August 2026.
Ramtin Ehsani, Shriya Rawal, Yuanfang Cai, and Preetha Chatterjee had a paper “Faster Code, Deeper Debt? A Multivocal Literature Review on Technical Debt and Its Early Signs in LLM-Assisted Software Development” published in Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM).
Jane Greenberg, Joel Pepper, Xintong Zhao, David Breen, and Yuan An, with a co-author Richard Marciano, had a paper “The Metadata Ecosystem and AI: Enabling FAIR and AI-ready Data” published in AI Magazine, May 2026.
Vasilis Gkatzelis, with co-authors Yuan Deng, Xizhi Tan, Grigoris Velegkas, and Song Zuo, had a paper “Forging Self-Funded Marketplaces among Strategic Agents” accepted to the 27th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC ‘26), July 2026.
Vasilis Gkatzelis, with co-authors Balasubramanian Sivan, Renato Paes Leme, Mihai Tiuca, Ian McFarlane, Nehal Mehta, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, Vahab Mirrokni, and Amin Vahdat, had a paper “Quota Marketplace: Dynamic Pricing for Efficient Allocation of ML Training Resources” accepted to the 20th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘26), July 2026.
Tim Gorichanaz, with a co-author Heidi Toivonen, had a paper “Young Adults’ Experiences with Smartphone Apps for Spiritual Support” accepted to the 29th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘26), to be published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI), October 2026.
Sanonda Datta Gupta and John S. Seberger, with a co-author Jaime Snyder, had a paper “Sleep-trackers in the Wild: A Faceted Taxonomy for Information and Interaction Design” published in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), May 2026.
Sanonda Datta Gupta and John S. Seberger had a paper “Sleep by the Numbers: Human-Centeredness and the Immanent Posthumanism of Users” published in AI & SOCIETY, May 2026.
Sanonda Datta Gupta and John S. Seberger had a paper “Beyond Counting Sheep: Data, Sensation, and Epistemic Agency” accepted to the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S ‘26), October 2026.
Sanonda Datta Gupta and John S. Seberger had a paper “Consumer Sleep-Tracking and the Infrastructural Production of Posthuman Sleepers” accepted to the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S ‘26), October 2026.
Parker Hartman and Tim Gorichanaz had a paper "Future Imperfect? Evaluating Whether AI-Powered Web Accessibility Overlays are Worth the Hype" accepted to the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '26), June 2026.
Shahin Jabbari, with a co-author Chen Wang, had a paper “Price of Fairness in Short-Term and Long-Term Algorithmic Selections” accepted to the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI ‘26), August 2026.
Yuyang Ji, Yixuan Shen, and Feng Liu, with co-authors Shengjie Zhu and Yu Kong, had a paper “From 3D Pose to Prose: Biomechanics-Grounded Vision-Language Coaching” published in the Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '26), June 2026.
Prabhu Prakash Kagitha, Ishan Desai, Cassie Huang, and Li Zhang, with co-authors Bo Sun, Andrew Zhu, Manling Li, and Ziyang Li, had a paper "Unifying Inference-Time Planning Language Generation" accepted to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL ‘26), to be published in Findings, July 2026.
Kshitij Kayastha, Vasilis Gkatzelis, and Shahin Jabbari had a paper “Learning-Augmented Robust Algorithmic Recourse” published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research, April 2026.
Yi Xuan Khoo and Helena M. Mentis, with co-authors Nora McDonald and Andrew Barlow, had a paper "Mutual Surveillance in Couples with Memory Concerns" accepted to the 29th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘26), to be published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI), October 2026.
Yi Xuan Khoo, with co-authors Lydia Stamato, Hasan Mahmud Prottoy, and Foad Hamidi, had a paper “A Fine Balance: Understanding Anti-Technosolutionist Strategies of Environmental Justice Advocates” published in the ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies, May 2026.
Feng Liu, with co-authors Mingbo Hong, Caroline Gevaert, George Vosselman, and Hao Cheng, had a paper “Bridge: Basis-Driven Causal Inference Marries VFMs for Domain Generalization” published in the Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '26), June 2026.
Aria Pessianzadeh, Shahin Jabbari, and Rezvaneh Rezapour, with co-authors Naima Sultana, Hildegarde Van den Bulck, David Gefen, had a paper “In Generative AI We (Dis)trust? Computational Analysis of Trust and Distrust in Reddit Discussions” accepted to Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL).
Aria Pessianzadeh, Alex H. Poole, and Rezvaneh Rezapour had a paper “Reddit after Roe: A Computational Analysis of Abortion Narratives and Barriers in the Wake of Dobbs” published in the Proceedings of the AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM ‘26), May 2026.
Shruti Phadke, with co-authors Shayan Alipour, Seyed Shahabeddin Mousavi, Amirhossein Afsharrad, Morteza Zihayat, and Mattia Samory had a paper “The Gray Area: Characterizing Moderator Disagreement on Reddit” published in the Proceedings of the AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM ‘26), May 2026.
Rezvaneh Rezapour, with co-authors Yasaman Asgari, Hongyu Zhou, Özgür Kadir Özer, Mary Ellen Sloane, and Alexandre Bovet, had a paper "Arab Spring’s Impact on Science Through the Lens of Scholarly Attention, Funding, and Migration” accepted to Scientometrics.
Rezvaneh Rezapour, with co-authors Maria Becker, Kanyao Han, Jana Diesner, and Andreas Witt, had a paper “Impact Classification Within and Beyond Academia: Domain-robust Annotation and the Capacity of Large Language Models” accepted to Language Resources and Evaluation.
John S. Seberger, with co-authors Louise Barkhuus, Jorge P. Campos and Anouk Mols, had a paper “Like Guardian Angels: Continuous Location-Sharing and the Production of Safety Among US College Students” published in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), April 2026.
John S. Seberger, Sanonda Datta Gupta, Afsaneh Razi, and Shadi Rezapour had a paper “Communicative Surrogates and the Ethics of LLM-Mediated Communication” published in AI & SOCIETY, June 2026.
John S. Seberger and Sanonda Datta Gupta had a paper “Critical Calculation and the Infrastructure of Sleep” accepted to the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S ‘26), October 2026.
Yixuan Shen, Jinxuan Fan, Yuyang Ji, and Feng Liu, with co-authors Peng He, Honglu Liu, Tingting Li, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu, had a paper “Can Multimodal LLMs ‘See’ Science Instruction? Benchmarking Pedagogical Reasoning in K-12 Classroom Videos” accepted to the 27th International Conference on AI in Education (AIED ‘26), July 2026.
Chen Sun, Joel Pepper, and David Breen had a paper “Yarn-Level Simulation of the Mesoscale Self-Folding Behavior of Weft-Knitted Textiles” presented at the World Conference of the Association of Universities for Textiles (AUTEX '26), June 2026.
Andrew To and Shruti Phadke, with co-authors Mattia Samory and Diana Pamfile, presented a paper “Asking For It: Question-Answering for Predicting Rule Infractions in Online Content Moderation” published in the Proceedings of the AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM ‘26), May 2026.
Rachel Typrin and Tim Gorichanaz had a paper “Needed This”: Understanding Hopecore Content and Engagement on Instagram” published in Journal of Documentation, March 2026.
Yifan Yao, Baojuan Wang, Jinhao Duan, and Zhibo Sun, with co-authors Kaidi Xu, ChuanKai Guo, Yue Zhang. Had a paper “The Imitation Game: Using Large Language Models as Chatbots to Combat Chat-Based Cybercrimes” accepted to the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS ‘26), June 2026.
Li Zhang, with co-authors Liancheng Gong, Wang Zhu, and Jesse Thomason had a paper “Iterative Formalization and Planning in Partially Observable Environments” accepted to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL ‘26), to be published in Findings, July 2026.
In the Spotlight
Celebrating Our PhD Graduates
Congratulations to our academic year 2025-26 PhD graduates and their advisors!
Layla Bouzoubaa, Information Science
“Lived Experiences of Substance Use and Expressions of Stigma: A Socio-Computational Exploration of Social Media Disclosures with LLM-based Supportive Interventions”
Advisor: Shadi Razapour
John Carter, Computer Science
“Behavioral Malware Detection on Edge Routers to Secure IoT Ecosystems”
Advisor: Spiros Mancoridis
Wook Choi, Information Science
“Semantic Shift as Scholarly Record: A Framework for Fuzziness-Aware Detection and Provenance-Aware Documentation Across Domains and Time”
Advisor: Mat Kelly
Steven Earth, Computer Science
“Developing Proof Proficiency through Proof Buddy: A Design-Science Approach to Equational Reasoning for Novice Programmers”
Advisor: Jeremey Johnson
Erick Galinkin, Computer Science
“Strategic Reinforcement Learning Agents for Autonomous Cyber Defense”
Advisor: Spiros Mancoridis
David Grethlein, Computer Science
“Extracting Spatiotemporal Concentrations of Discriminative Features from Driving Simulator Time Series Data”
Advisor: Santiago Ontañón
Niusha Jaffari, Information Science
“GraphCHASUR: A Change-Point-Aware, Survival-Informed Temporal Network Framework for Adverse Event Analysis”
Advisor: Christopher Yang
Wendy Khoo, Information Science
“Supporting AI-Driven Mental Health Application Users’ Privacy Decision Making”
Advisor: Helena Mentis
Jason Lefever, Computer Science
“Concern-based Management of Design Debt”
Advisor: Yuanfang Cai
Mary Mueni Lucas, Information Science
“A Framework for Fair and Robust Clinical Risk Prediction through Collaborative Learning and Localized Uncertainty Quantification”
Advisor: Christopher Yang
Scott McClellan, Information Science
“An Investigation of Materials Science Researchers’ Comprehension of Metadata Supporting Data Sharing”
Advisor: Jane Greenberg
Bobby Nguyen, Information Science
“Exploring Sociocultural and Engagement Strategies to Enhance Knowledge-sharing in the Evolving Workplace”
Advisor: Erjia Yan
Joel Pepper, Computer Science
“An Epithelium-Inspired Deformation Modeling Framework for Responsive 4D Materials”
Advisor: David Breen
Yiwen Shi, Information Science
“Towards Effective Biomedical Natural Language Processing with Large Language Models”
Advisor: Tony Hu
Christopher Rauch, Information Science
“ProEthica: A Case-Based Methodology for Computational Support of Professional Ethical Evaluation”
Advisor: Mat Kelly
Manil Shrestha, Computer Science
“Trustworthy Generative AI Through Security, Safety, Verification, and Grounding”
Advisor: Ed Kim
Ximing Wen, Information Science
“Investigating Intrinsic Interpretability in Transformer-based Language Models”
Advisor: Rosina Weber
Deanna Zarillo, Information Science
“Policy or Performance?: A Sociotechnical Analysis of Privacy, Persistence, and Perspectives on Gender Identity in Academic Publishing”
Advisor: Erjia Yan
Submit Faculty and Student Accomplishments