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
Computer Science Assistant Professor Feng Liu, PhD received an in-kind gift of $32,000 in GPU hours from the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program to support autonomous driving AI research. Learn more.
Liu is also a Co-PI on two recently awarded 2026 Longsview Fellowships. The first, awarded to his colleague, Drexel School of Engineering professor Fernanda Campos da Cruz Rios, PhD (PI), will support their research on automated detection of façade-level material to advance urban material stock and flow analysis. The second, awarded to the PI, Drexel professor Matthew McDonald, PhD (chemical and biological engineering), will be focused on using generative AI for organic crystal structure prediction.
Computer Science Assistant Professor Li “Harry” Zhang, PhD is a Co-PI on a recent 2026 Grimes Family Faculty Award with School of Engineering colleague Zhiwei Chen, PhD (PI). The award will support their research on neurosymbolic learning for safe autonomous driving under ambiguous trust.
Computer Science Associate Professor Edward Kim, PhD received a grant of $11,025 from trading firm Hard Eight Trading, LLC that will support PhD research on comparative analysis of machine learning models for gold futures forecasting.
Honors & Recognition
Professor and Information Science Department Head Helena Mentis, PhD received the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Lifetime Service Award. This award highlights Mentis’s remarkable contributions to the growth and success of SIGCHI over many years. Learn more.
First-year information science PhD student Tzu-Yu Weng and Information Science Assistant Professor Karthik S. Bhat, PhD received an Honorable Mention Award for their paper “A Blessing and a Challenge: Unpacking Boundary Ambiguities Experienced by Caregivers of Older Adults” that will be presented at ACM CHI 2026 in Barcelona, Spain, April 13-16, 2026. Honorable Mention awards are given only to the top 5% of submissions. Learn more about their award. Read more about CHI 2026.
Jane Greenberg, PhD, Alice B. Kroeger professor of information science and director of CCI’s Metadata Center, and co-authors Yuan An, PhD, associate professor of information science, Mat Kelly, PhD, assistant professor of information science, PhD students Scott McClellan and Christopher B. Rauch, as well as Addy Ireland, Robert Sammarco, Colton Gerber, John Kunze, and Eric Toberer were recognized by AI World for their paper “Human-in-the-Loop and AI: Crowdsourcing Metadata Vocabulary for Materials Science” as one of “Week 50’s notable AI research papers.”
Information Science Associate Professor Michelle Rogers, PhD was featured on WHYY for her innovative program, Black Girls STEAMing Through Dance, which blends coding and computational thinking with movement and design to engage underrepresented students in science, technology, engineering, art and math. Learn more.
Recent Publications & Conference Participation
Information Science Professor Ellen Bass, PhD and SCIS students Benson Zhang, BS software engineering ‘26, and Junkai Ge, BS data science ‘26, with co-authors Tauseef Ibne Mamun and Meghan B. Lane-Fall, had a paper “Supporting Inspection of Structured Qualitative Team Task Analytic Data” accepted to the 17th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE), July 2026.
Karthik S. Bhat, PhD with co-authors Jiayue Melissa Shi, Wenxuan Song, Dong Whi Yoo, and Koustuv Saha, had a paper “‘In my defense, only three hours on Instagram’: Designing Toward Digital Self-Awareness and Wellbeing,” accepted to ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), April 2026.
PhD candidate Layla Bouzoubaa, PhD student Elham Aghakhani, and Information Science Assistant Professor Shadi Rezapour, PhD had a paper “Phenotypes of Stigma Expressed by People who Use Drugs on Reddit,” published in Social Science and Medicine.
Computer Science Professor Yuanfang Cai, PhD with co-authors Humberto Cervantes and Rick Kazman, had a paper “Improving LLM-assisted Code Generation through the Use of Architectural Documents and Implementation Plans” accepted to the Designing 2026 Workshop, co-located with the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026), April 2026.
Additionally, Cai, with co-authors Humberto Cervantes and Rick Kazman, had a paper “LLMs as Assistants in Software Architecture Design” accepted to IEEE Software.
Computer Science Assistant Professor Preetha Chatterjee, PhD with co-authors Mia Mohammad Imran, Robert Zita, Rahat Rizvi Rahman, and Kostadin Damevski, had a paper “Toxicity Ahead: Forecasting Conversational Derailment on GitHub” accepted to the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Research Track, April 2026. (Acceptance rate: 19.8%).
In addition, Chatterjee and PhD student Ramtin Ehsani, with co-authors Esteban Parra, Sonia Haiduc, and Polina Iaremchuk, had a paper “Towards A Sustainable Future for Peer Review in Software Engineering” accepted to the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Future of Software Engineering (FoSE) Track, April 2026.
Ehsani; Sakshi Pathak, MS computer science ‘25; current MS in data science student Shriya Rawal; and Chatterjee, with co-authors Abdullah Al Mujahid and Mia Mohammad Imran, had a paper “Where Do AI Coding Agents Fail? An Empirical Study of Failed Agentic Pull Requests in GitHub” accepted to the 23rd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Mining Challenge Track, April 2026.
SCIS graduate student Hongzhou Fang, Yuanfang Cai, PhD, and PhD candidate in computer science Jason Lefever, with co-authors, Ewan Tempero, Rick Kazman, Yu-ChengTu, and Ernst Pisch, had a paper “A Holistic Approach to Design Understanding Through Concept Explanation” accepted to the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026), Journal First Papers, April 2026.
PhD candidate Prateek Goel and Professor Rosina Weber, PhD had a paper “Measuring Interpretability: A Systematic Literature Review of Interpretability Measures in Artificial Intelligence” published in International Journal on AI Tools.
Computer science doctoral student Cassie Huang, computer science undergraduate student Stuti Mohan, and Li “Harry” Zhang, PhD, with co-authors Ziyi Yang and Stefanie Tellex, had a paper “Language Model as Planner and Formalizer under Constraints” accepted to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), July 2026.
SCIS doctoral students Yuyang Ji and Yixuan Shen, and Feng Liu, PhD, with co-authors Shengjie Zhu and Yu Kong, had paper “From 3D Pose to Prose: Biomechanics-Grounded Vision-Language Coaching” accepted to the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 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” accepted to the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2026.
Information science PhD candidate Mohammad “Matt” Namvarpour, Brandon Brofsky, MS human-computer interaction and user experience ‘25, information science doctoral student Jessica Y. Medina, and Information Science Assistant Professor Afsaneh Razi, PhD with a co-author Mamtaj Akter, had a paper “Understanding Teen Overreliance on AI Companion Chatbots Through Self-Reported Reddit Narratives” accepted to the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), April 2026.
Information Science Assistant Professor Shruti Phadke, PhD had a paper “Reinforcing the Unreal: Subliminals and the Normalization of Unscientific Body Transformations on Reddit” accepted to the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), April 2026.
Information Science Associate Professor Alex H. Poole, PhD with a co-author Ashley Todd-Diaz, had a paper “Putting it into practice is the best way to really learn something’: Evaluating the North American Graduate Archival Education Curriculum” published in The American Archivist.
Poole and Todd-Diaz also had a paper “‘Ugh, it’s a difficult topic’: Positionality Statements as Information Use in Information and Library Science Research” accepted to iConference 2026 (to be published in Information Research), April 2026.
Computer Science Professor Emeritus Jeffrey L. Popyack, PhD, Computer Science Associate Teaching Professor Tammy R. Pirmann, EdD, and Computer Science Associate Teaching Professor Daniel Moix, MSE, with a co-author Brigitte Valesey, had a poster “Barriers and Mitigations: Recruiting and Training CS Teachers in a Large Urban School District” published in the Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V.2 (SIGCSE TS), February 2026.
PhD student Christopher Rauch and Rosina Weber, PhD had a paper “ProEthica: A Professional Role Based Ethical Analysis Tool Using LLM-Orchestrated, Ontology Supported Case Based Reasoning” published in the Proceedings of the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), January 2026.
SCIS Interim Associate Dean for Research Development & Information Science Professor Aleksandra Sarcevic, PhD, with co-authors Wanzhao Yang, Beomseok Park, Mary S. Kim, Syed M. Anwar, Marius. G. Linguraru, Ivan Marsic, and Randall S. Burd, had a paper “SAFE: A Smart Adherence Detection Framework for Monitoring Personal Protective Equipment in Healthcare Settings” published in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.
PhD candidate Daniel Schwartz, SCIS Interim Associate Dean of Academic Operations and Computer Science Professor Dario Salvucci, PhD, Computer Science Assistant Teaching Professor Yusuf Osmanlioglu, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher Richard Vallett, PhD ‘19, Drexel Professor Genevieve Dion, and SCIS Interim Dean and Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science Ali Shokoufandeh, PhD, had a paper “Resource-Efficient Gesture Recognition through Convexified Attention” accepted to the 18th International ACM SIGCHI Conference on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS 2026) (to be published Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI)), June 2026.
Information Science Assistant Professor John S. Seberger, PhD had a chapter “Interaction with the Vampire” published in a collection edited by Benedikt Merkle and Bernhard Siegert (Eds.), Reckoning with Everything: The Becoming-Environmental of Computing. Meson Press.
Computer Science Assistant Professor Zhibo Sun, PhD with co-authors Yi Jou Li, Zeming Yu, James A Mattei, Ananta Soneji, Ruoyu “Fish” Wang, Jaron Mink, Daniel Votipka, and Tiffany Bao, had a paper “I Can SE Clearly Now: Investigating the Effectiveness of GUI-based Symbolic Execution for Software Vulnerability Discovery” accepted to the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), April 2026.
Information Science Assistant Teaching Professor Hegler Tissot, PhD, Justin Moore, Eric Benton, and Sarah Alshahrani, with co-authors Maria Helena Franciscatto and Marcos D. Del Fabro, had paper “SYNNER Synthetic Data Generator Framework,” published in Digital Health.
Rachel Tyrpin '25 and Information Science Associate Teaching Professor Tim Gorichanaz, PhD conducted research during her final co-op at Drexel looking at the hopecore phenomenon on Instagram, which was accepted for publication in Journal of Documentation.
Rosina Weber, PhD gave an invited talk, “XAI is in Trouble, but are LLMs?” at the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) Speaker Series.
Information Science PhD student Ximing Wen and Shadi Rezapour, PhD had a paper “A Transformer and Prototype-based Interpretable Model for Contextual Sarcasm Detection,” accepted to the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis (WASSA), March 2026.
Noteworthy Updates
Alex H. Poole, PhD assumed the position of Chair, Education Committee, of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) for 2025–2026.
Michelle Rogers, PhD was appointed as an Associate Editor for the Human Factors in Healthcare journal.
The book Multimodal Communication in Human-Robot Interaction was submitted to the publisher in January and is planned for publication later this year. Among the co-authors are CCI professors Rosina Weber, PhD and Edward Kim, PhD alongside Veton Këpuska, Steven Liu, Marius Silaghi, Edwin Nowicki, Michael Sintek, and Sheuli Paul.
Submit Faculty and Student Accomplishments