Qi Zhang
Trustworthy and uncertainty-aware AI for safe and resilient online human-centered systems.
People & mentoring
Dr. Jin-Hee Cho directs tClab and serves as committee chair for the Ph.D. and master’s students listed below. She also mentors undergraduate researchers, visiting scholars, and research interns.
Current Ph.D. students
Dawood Wasif
Responsible AI and its applications.
Heajun Andy An
AI-assisted cybersecurity training and education for vulnerable populations.
Sindhuja Madabushi
Ethical AI and its applications.
Current master’s students
Randy Fu
Research: secureSPARK: adversarial threats to the SPARK AI-driven citizen-science platform.
Support: VICEROY.
Current undergraduate students
Yousif A. Abuhaija
Research: secureSPARK: adversarial threats to the SPARK AI-driven citizen-science platform.
Support: VICEROY.
Ph.D. alumni
Dr. Dian Chen
Dr. Han Jun Yoon
Dr. Zelin Wan
Dr. Zhen Guo
Dr. Qisheng Zhang
Autonomous Cyber Defense for Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems
Master’s alumni
Taylor Neller
Towards Better Turn-Based Strategy Planning Agents: Turn-Based Evolutionary Tree Search
Shutonu Mitra
SCVI: Bridging Social and Cyber Dimensions for Comprehensive Vulnerability Assessment
George Abdel Messih
RESONANT: Reinforcement Learning Based Moving Target Defense for Detecting Credit Card Fraud
Ashrith Reddy Thukkaraju
Haider Ali
ACADIA: Efficient and Robust Adversarial Attacks Against Deep Reinforcement Learning
Pei Wang
Dr. Jaber Valinejad
Measuring and Analyzing Community Resilience During COVID-19 Using Social Media
Yash Mahajan
Former undergraduate research mentees at Virginia Tech
- Jonathan Liu · Fall 2025–Spring 2026 · Research: XAI-Based Misclassification Detection for Animal Disease Diagnosis · Support: NSF REU.
- Arda Dogan · Fall 2025–Spring 2026 · Research: XAI-Based Misclassification Detection for Animal Disease Diagnosis · Support: NSF REU.
- Vedanth Achanta · Fall 2025–Spring 2026 · Research: Intelligent Conversational Agents for Adolescent Cyber Resilience · Support: VICEROY.
- Arin Sobhani · Fall 2025–Spring 2026 · Research: Intrusion Response Systems for Autonomous Vehicles with Human–Machine Teaming · Support: VICEROY.
- Connor Ng · Research: AI-Powered Scam Prevention for Older Adults · Support: VICEROY.
- Thomas Nguyen · October 2024–Spring 2025 · Research: Social Cyber Vulnerability Measurement and Evaluation for Inclusive Cybersecurity · Support: VICEROY (CREATORS).
- Arav Singh · October 2024–Spring 2025 · Research: Conversational Agents for Adolescent Cyber Resilience · Support: VICEROY (CREATORS).
- Raj Kashikar · Fall 2024; Spring 2025 · Research: Human–AI Teaming-Based Intrusion Response Systems for Autonomous Vehicles (Fall 2024, VICEROY / CREATORS); Animal Disease Detection under XAI Threats (Spring 2025, NSF REU Fellowship).
- Angelie Nguyen · Fall 2024 · Research: Ethical Federated Learning and Animal Disease Detection under XAI Threats · Support: VICEROY (CREATORS).
- Sagar Chauhan · Fall 2024 · Research: Human–AI Teaming-Based Intrusion Response Systems for Autonomous Vehicles · Support: Unpaid research internship.
- Hoon Sung · Fall 2024 · Research: Personalized AI Training to Combat Online Scams for Neurodivergent Seniors · Support: Wage-based research assistant.
- Nithin Alluru · Fall 2023–Fall 2024 · Research: Human–Machine Teaming with Cyber Deception and Ethical Federated Learning · Support: VICEROY (CREATORS).
- Mohammad Mian · April–July 2024 · Research: Fair Federated Learning-Based Monitoring Systems for Smart Farms · Support: NSF REU.
- Mallika Pamula · January–May 2024 · Research: Federated Learning-Based Monitoring Systems for Smart Farms · Support: VICEROY (CREATORS).
- David Soon · August 2023–May 2024 · Research: Intrusion Response Systems · Support: VICEROY (CREATORS).
- Vihaan Jaiswal · May–December 2023 · Research: Incentive Mechanisms for Federated Learning Systems · Support: VICEROY (CREATORS).
- Paul Yang · August–November 2023 · Research: Smart Farm Monitoring Systems · Support: NSF REU.
- Ashley Covitz · September 2022–April 2023 · Support: VICEROY (CREATORS).
- Quinn Apostolico · September 2022–April 2023 · Support: CREATOR Program.
- Adrian Corzo · September 2022–April 2023 · Support: CREATOR Program.
Former visiting scholars, interns & other research mentees at Virginia Tech
- Steven Chen · M.S., Old Dominion University; January–May 2026 · Research: Explainable and Uncertainty-Aware AI-Based Misclassification Detection · Support: VICEROY (AFRL via the Griffiss Institute).
- Minseo Park · Visiting scholar, KENTECH, South Korea; Fall 2025 · Research: TAILGUARD: An Uncertainty-Driven Ensemble Against Long-Tailed Cyber Threats.
- Suha Kim · Visiting scholar, KENTECH, South Korea; Fall 2025 · Research: PRIVA: Privacy-Preserving Invertible Generative Anonymization for Visual Data.
- Ashton L. Lard · Undergraduate, Norfolk State University; October 2024–May 2025 · Research: AI-Assisted Framework for Scam Detection Training for Older Adults · Support: VICEROY (AFRL via the Griffiss Institute).
- Christopher Herriott · Undergraduate, Norfolk State University; October 2024–May 2025 · Research: AI-Assisted Framework for Scam Detection Training for Older Adults · Support: VICEROY (AFRL via the Griffiss Institute).
- Hyungmin Kim · M.Eng., research assistant; November 2024–August 2025 · Research: Explainable AI models for scam detection and risk assessment for older adults under the CCI SWVA IIC project · Support: Wage research assistant.
- Richard He · High school intern, W. T. Woodson High School; June 2023–July 2024 · Research: Literature review and dataset analysis for AI-based cybergrooming detection.
- Marcos Santos da Silva · Visiting intern, exchange student from Northern Virginia Community College; September 2023–May 2024 · Research: Comparative analysis of machine learning and multimodal approaches for online grooming detection and evaluation benchmarking.
- Seunghyun Yoon · Visiting scholar, Ph.D., GIST; August 2019–February 2020 · Research: Multiagent Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Moving Target Defense for Software-Defined In-Vehicle Networks.
- Beom Woo Kang · Visiting intern, undergraduate exchange student, Hanyang University; Summer 2019 · Research: A Survey on Centrality Metrics and Their Network Resilience Analysis.
Mentoring & outreach
Dr. Cho has graduated five Ph.D. and eight M.S. students as committee chair. Advisees have received a Department Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award and three Outstanding Master’s Thesis Awards.
She organized NSF-funded AI Awareness Workshops for community college students in 2022, 2024, and 2025.
Contact the lab about opportunities →