Research

At a recent gathering of air quality researchers from across the Washington, D.C., region and beyond, George Mason University officially launched a new center that aims to advance Earth system science in atmospheric composition and air quality. 

As debates over digital propaganda, misinformation, and media manipulation intensify, audiences are increasingly unsure what’s fact and what’s fiction across news outlets and social media feeds. At George Mason University, Sergei Samoilenko, associate professor in the Department of Communication, is working to better understand how digital disruption and manipulation practices shape public perception.

NIH-funded George Mason study found that maternal obesity and excessive pregnancy weight gain were linked to higher obesity risk by age 3.

Cyber Security Engineering Associate Professor Umit Karabiyik helps law enforcement agencies understand how data from everyday connected devices can provide critical evidence in criminal cases.

The widely used machine-learning technique known as LASSO relegates smaller market events to an ignored “inactive zone”. How can that be a good thing for ambitious asset traders? Bo Hu, assistant professor of finance, explores the logic (and illogic) behind LASSO’s popularity and power.

Nora McDonald received an NSF CAREER award for $748,000 to understand how adolescents are shaped by personalized digital environments and how they can maintain their sense of self, autonomy, and agency within them.

A real-world experiment found that when men on matching platforms were shown only the women whose profiles fit established cultural criteria, it improved outcomes for women without harming men, says Sabari Rajan Karmegam, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at Costello College of Business.

Many accessibility surveys depend on manual measurements, handwritten notes, and extensive walkthroughs with compliance checklists. A team of George Mason University engineering students wondered if a robot could do it faster. Nine months later, they created one. 

Undergraduate George Mason cyber security engineering students uncovered how subtle timing-based attacks can manipulate a robot’s perception and behavior and presented their research at a premier conference.

PhD student Shiwei Hong developed a collaborative multi-agent AI system that mimics a comedy writers’ room, demonstrating that discussion and feedback among agents improve the quality of machine-generated humor.