Maria Ann Herd 9/26/25 Maria Ann Herd 9/26/25

GW-NASA System Wide Safety (SWS) Collaboration Advances GW Aviation Safety Research

GW’s Peng Wei led a NASA project that developed and flight-tested AI-driven safety systems to manage risks for drones and emerging aircraft, culminating in a NASA workshop at GW.

Maria Ann Herd 9/24/25 Maria Ann Herd 9/24/25

Humans and AI Join Forces

UMD researchers revamp quizbowl competition to better gauge trust and collaboration between people and machines.

Maria Ann Herd 9/22/25 Maria Ann Herd 9/22/25

UMD Faculty Member Co-Hosts Workshop to Advance Automated Speech Recognition Systems Used for Education

UMD’s Jing Liu helped organize the event, which focused on improving the volume and quality of speech datasets used for children’s education.

Maria Ann Herd 9/18/25 Maria Ann Herd 9/18/25

AI Already Beat Jeopardy’s Ken Jennings, Are Any of Us Safe?

UMD’s Jordan Boyd-Graber participated in a Q&A with The Baltimore Sun about AI singularity, stressing that while it’s unlikely in the near term, the greater concern is how bad actors are already misusing AI today.

Maria Ann Herd 9/15/25 Maria Ann Herd 9/15/25

TRAILS Summer Fellows Develop Technology to Enhance Reliability in AI Responses for Blind Users

The five undergraduates spent 10 weeks at UMD working with the blind and low-vision community to develop a mobile app that adds verification layers to AI responses to make them more reliable and trustworthy.

Maria Ann Herd 9/8/25 Maria Ann Herd 9/8/25

With AI Common on Campus, Some Educators Are Leaning In

UMD’s Katie Shilton discusses how AI tutors like TeachGPT can broaden individualized learning and encourage student questions—while stressing that classroom interaction is still vital.

Maria Ann Herd 9/2/25 Maria Ann Herd 9/2/25

Artificial Intelligence is Being used in Schools, But Statewide Guidance is a Work in Progress

UMD’s Jing Liu told Maryland Matters that evidence-based research needs to be done quickly to help inform policymakers and school district leaders on how to design AI policy, which should include certain tools used to meet education standards and guardrails to ensure appropriate uses.

Maria Ann Herd 7/22/25 Maria Ann Herd 7/22/25

TRAILS Announces Third Round of Seed Funding

Seven grants totaling just over $750,000 were awarded to multidisciplinary teams representing all four of TRAILS’ academic institutions—the University of Maryland, George Washington University, Morgan State University and Cornell University.

Maria Ann Herd 7/16/25 Maria Ann Herd 7/16/25

Embodied AI Can Close the Nonverbal Communication Gap for Blind Individuals

UMD’s Huaishu Peng and Ge Gao collaborating with Cornell’s Malte Jung, are developing an AI-infused, touch-based and audio feedback device that can convey physical cues between blind and sighted co-workers that might previously have gone unnoticed.

Maria Ann Herd 6/2/25 Maria Ann Herd 6/2/25

TRAILS Researchers Part of Team Receiving $1.8M DARPA Award to Make AI More Trustworthy

UMD’s Soheil Feizi and Furong Huang are collaborating with experts at NYU to make AI-driven large language models more consistent, adaptable and secure in high-stakes environments.

Maria Ann Herd 5/31/25 Maria Ann Herd 5/31/25

Feizi Interviewed by CBS on AI Text Detectors

UMD’s Soheil Feizi explains how current AI detection tools are often unreliable and should be used with caution in high-stakes settings involving academic integrity.

Maria Ann Herd 5/30/25 Maria Ann Herd 5/30/25

UMD Researchers Investigate Security Threats to Web AI Agents

In a first of its kind study, UMD’s Furong Huang uncovered crucial factors underlying vulnerabilities of web AI agents, highlighting the need for enhanced security measures.

Maria Ann Herd 5/29/25 Maria Ann Herd 5/29/25

Feizi Receives $1M Award to Advance the Foundations of Reasoning AI Models

UMD’s Soheil Feizi is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Maria Ann Herd 5/28/25 Maria Ann Herd 5/28/25

Anti-Smoking Chatbots Provide Sound Advice—Most of the Time

GW’s Lorien Abroms and David Broniatowski evaluated three chatbots’ responses to users who asked for information about ways to stop smoking.

Maria Ann Herd 5/19/25 Maria Ann Herd 5/19/25

TRAILS Leadership Part of Winning Team in UMD Invention of the Year Competition

Hal Daumé III and Katie Shilton were part of a group that won in the social innovation category for their technology that can teach students in any discipline about AI and information literacy.

Maria Ann Herd 4/25/25 Maria Ann Herd 4/25/25

Peng Wei Shapes Global AI Safety Conversation Ahead of Paris AI Summit

GW’s Peng Wei spoke at the IAESEAI Conference and the IP Paris’ AI, Science, and Society Conference ahead of the AI Action Summit.

Maria Ann Herd 4/18/25 Maria Ann Herd 4/18/25

To Make Language Models Work Better, Researchers Sidestep Language

UMD's Tom Goldstein was featured in Quanta Magazine for developing a novel language model that reasons in latent space and learns when to switch to language, significantly improving efficiency and performance on complex tasks.