My group’s mission is to advance systems by enhancing cognitive capabilities and ensuring the safety and security of them. We strive to redefine synergistic interaction between humans and systems through innovative AI algorithms inspired by cognitive science.
NVIDIA Workshop on “Building AI Agents with Multimodal Models”
Enhancing Empathy in Large Language Models
Roopika defended her MS Thesis (April 8, 2026) on “Enhancing Empathy in Conversational AI with Interpretable Lexicons and Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback”. Her contributions include emotion-targeted lexicons and repetition aware empathetic response generation for emotionally grounded, and trustworthy empathetic systems.
Second Annual IEEE EMBS Workshop on AI and Healthcare on Dec 5, 2025
Bishal PhD Proposal on “Enhancing Explainability and Ethical Decision Making of Large Language Models”
(Nov 2025)
“Innovate with AI” Summer Camp for Middle School Kids
REU Summer 2025
Julian, who is working on the Google CAHSI project, presented on ‘Explaining the Black Box Through Ethical Decision Making in Large Language Models.’
Assessing Gender Bias and Ethical Reasoning in Large Language Models
Chris defended his MS thesis on April 10, 2025. His work addresses LLM limitations on gender bias and ethical reasoning through a two-pronged investigation. 1) It examines implicit gender bias in STEM-related prompts across multiple LLMs, revealing how stereotypes persist in model-generated responses through both qualitative analysis and word cloud visualizations. 2) It evaluates the consistency and explainability of ethical reasoning using a curated subset of the ETHICS dataset.
IEEE EMBS Workshop on AI and Healthcare
Middle School Summer Camp on Innovate with AI
NSF REU 2024
UG students made progress in humanizing LLM and predicting stress.
Leveraging RL for Enhanced Security of CV
Pranay defended his Masters thesis (2024) on "Enhancing Security of Connected Vehicles (CV)". His contributions were three fold: 1) Distinguishing sensor faults and malicious attacks in CVs using peer based measurements 2) Detecting data falsification attacks using Dempster Shafer and Reinforcement Learning algorithms 3) Mitigating colluding attacks in CV.
NSF stEm PEER- SWRI Trip
As part of NSF Engineering Plus Alliance my focus is to increasing female participation in computing and expanding transfer pathways to TXST
Poster Day
PhD students showcased their work on how they are using emergent technologies for enhancing health.
NSF REU 2023
Female UG students made tremendous advancements in developing the necessary data infrastructure and supporting algorithms to enable trust-based security at scale.
Dr Heena Rathore 