UNLV’s Rebel Recon team recently took first place in the national CISA-recognized Social Engineering Competition (SEC). The team is made up of graduate students Shanzeh Aslam, (Computer Science; Information Systems), Hareign Casaclang, (Computer Science; CyberCorps SFS Scholar), Bianca Ionescu, (Computer Science; Information Systems; CyberCorps…

Team UNLV took first in the nation in the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity (NCAE) Cyber Games Invitational. This win comes after the competition's regional event which saw 1,100 students from across the nation compete for the opportunity to test their skills at the Invitational. Led by Layer Zero, the team was comprising…

Louis Dumontet and Mingon Kang (both Computer Science) published a paper titled, "Plastic hydrolytic enzyme classification using explainable deep learning," in ACS Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The team developed PEPIC, an explainable AI framework that predicts plastic-degrading enzymes across 9 substrate types. By identifying "hot…

An Huang, Junggab Son, and Zuobin Xiong (all Computer Science) submitted a paper that was accepted as a regular paper at ICML 2026, one of the top-tier conferences in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning: "Watch Your Step: Information Injection in Diffusion Models via Shadow Timestep Embedding."

Kavita Batra, Noehealani Antolin (Medicine), Sara Rosenkranz (Kinesiology and Nutrition Sciences), and Jorge Fonseca Cacho (Computer Science) received institutional seed funding through UNLV’s Interdisciplinary Research Development Area (iRDA) in AI and Big Data for their project, “Responsible AI in Survey-Based Research: Developing an Ethical…

CyberCorps SFS scholars Hareign Casaclang (Computer Science) and Bianca Ionescu (Computer Science; Information Systems) recently had their research paper, "Self-Hosted Workflow Automation for AI-Based Cybersecurity Operations," published in the Spring 2026 edition of the Journal of The Colloquium.  The journal is published by the Colloquium…

Two papers of Sai Phani Parsa, Euiseong Ko, Beomsu Baek, Sai Kosaraju, and Mingon Kang (all Computer Science) have been accepted at the International conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2026. ISMB is widely considered the world's largest and most prestigious flagship conference in bioinformatics and…

UNLV faculty and graduate students Metehan Zorluoglu (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Dilara Kara-Zorluoglu (Curriculum and Instruction; Education), and Hasan Deniz (Teaching and Learning) helped elementary school students achieve recognition as Nevada State Winners in the Presidential AI Challenge, Elementary Category Track II (Technical/…

Highly interdisciplinary team, Lois Suh (Medicine), Euiseong Ko (Computer Science), Beomsu Baek (Computer Science), Jiwon Yoo (Medicine), Jay J. Shen (Public Health), and Mingon Kang (Computer Science) published a paper, entitled "Examining Ethnic and Racial Variations in Opioid-related Hospitalizations Using Western U.S. Electronic Health Records…

UNLV’s Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) Student Chapter recently received the National 2026 Student Chapter of the Year award from the international WiCyS organization. Students received the prestigious recognition while attending the 2026 WiCyS Conference that took place in Maryland in March. The award recognizes the outstanding leadership and…

Avinash Yaganapu, Sai Phani Parsa, and Mingon Kang (all Computer Science) published a paper, "Prediction of bacterial Cytochrome P450-compound interactions based on positive-unlabeled deep learning," in Bioinformatics. Many biological interaction datasets (e.g., protein-compound interactions) suffer from a fundamental problem: we often only…

Dillon Davidson, Zuobin Xiong, and Junggab Son (all Computer Science) had their paper accepted, titled “GPU Accelerated Fully Homomorphic Encryption Framework for End-to-End Logistic Regression,” at the 22nd EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (acceptance rate: 29.1%).