Yellow Jacket Research Roundup: Empathetic AI, Recovered Chats, and a National Book Award Finalist

Georgia Tech’s research and academic community had a busy stretch, with new work spanning artificial intelligence and mental health, digital forensics, public health, economics, and the arts — plus a full slate of Ethics Week events coming to campus. Here’s what caught our eye.

Research and Discovery

A former high school participant in the College of Computing’s BridgeUP STEM program has come full circle. Ashley Ni, now a computer science student, has returned to the program as a Helen Fellow to research AI in mental healthcare — the first BridgeUP STEM participant to experience the program as both scholar and fellow. Funded by the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation, BridgeUP STEM gives first-generation and low-income students early, hands-on exposure to computing research.

As more people turn to large language models during personal crises, how well do those models actually handle emotional distress? Georgia Tech researchers have built a new neural framework that examines how different training sources shape empathy and social reasoning inside AI models — work that could make the next generation of chatbots genuinely better listeners.

On a related front, a Georgia Tech team found that a surprisingly simple change can make AI chatbots safer. Across 1,280 experiments involving eight AI models and simulated conversations about delusional beliefs, researchers Lorenzo de la Loza and Vijay Madisetti showed that adjusting a chatbot’s instructions can meaningfully reduce how often it reinforces false beliefs. The work was accepted to the ACM AI Letters publication.

Deleting a chat with an AI assistant may not erase as much as you’d think. Georgia Tech researchers developed ORISA, a tool that can recover deleted conversations from AI assistants running on Android phones and even rebuild them into a working session. It’s a potential new avenue for digital investigators — and a real privacy consideration for everyone else.

AI is also being put to work on one of public health’s hardest questions: who gets care first. A team of computer scientists and physicians led by Georgia Tech is using Restless Multi-Armed Bandit models to help clinicians deliver the right diabetes intervention to the right patient at the right time when time, funding, and staff are all limited.

Clinicians treating veterans with PTSD may soon have far better insight into what happens between sessions. A new sensing data toolkit lets therapists see how patients’ bodies actually react in triggering environments, filling gaps that retrospective self-reports leave behind.

What happens when the instruments sailors depend on start lying to them? In a study accepted for the 2026 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Georgia Tech researchers interviewed 20 military sailors about GPS spoofing and other threats, uncovering a gap between emergency training and the realities of maritime cyberattacks.

Outside of computing, School of Economics researcher Shatakshee Dhongde reports that quality of life for Americans 65 and older improved over the past decade. Using a multidimensional well-being index she pioneered, Dhongde weighed income, housing costs, disabilities, and digital access together rather than in isolation — an approach that helps policymakers spot overlapping disadvantages.

Arts, Humanities, and the Wider World

Victoria Chang, the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech, has been named a National Book Award finalist in Poetry for her collection Tree of Knowledge, joining a short list of just 180 poets recognized since the prize was reinstated in 1991.

And at Atlanta’s National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Nunn School professor and Regents’ Entrepreneur Kirk Bowman served as the sole academic consultant for “The People’s Game: Soccer and Human Rights,” an exhibit connecting the world’s most popular sport to the global struggle for human rights.

On Campus: Ethics Week and More

Georgia Tech’s Ethics and Compliance team has a packed Ethics Week lineup. Highlights include the USG Chancellor’s event featuring Justice Harold Melton (virtual, Nov. 2), student tabling on Ferst Walkway (Nov. 3), a Pop Culture + Ethics table (Nov. 5), and pop-up outreach at GTRI’s 14th Street and Cobb County locations (Oct. 30).

For researchers and faculty, two sessions are worth a calendar block: Research Ethics and Compliance: Who to Talk to and When? (Nov. 4) walks through IRB, Regulatory Affairs, and other oversight functions across the research lifecycle, while Ethics and Healthcare (Nov. 6), hosted by Dr. Jason Lesandrini, digs into the tensions between patient needs, institutional policy, and professional duty. The USG Ethics Awareness Week Best Practices Panel on ethical leadership in an innovation era rounds things out on Nov. 6, with continuing education credits available.

• Copilot Studio Foundations — Microsoft walks attendees through building custom AI agents from scratch.
• S2C Networking Mixer with Microsoft — second-year students get low-pressure practice at professional networking with Microsoft guests.
• International Coffeehouse Language Tables — coffee, cider, and conversation in everything from Spanish to Sindhi, part of International Education Week.

Which of these are you most excited about? Drop a comment and let us know what Georgia Tech research you’d like us to dig into next — and share this with a fellow Yellow Jacket who’d appreciate it.