Leading in Research: Khoury College at Conferences
Every year, numerous researchers at Khoury College make transformative contributions to many fields within computer science — collaborating, publishing, leading national and international projects, and participating in top conferences within their specialty areas.
In 2025, Khoury and Khoury-affiliated researchers had a prolific conference presence, presenting four or more publications at 24 conferences and with representation at 122 conferences, the most ever by the college — each with the common focus and goal of providing Khoury College researchers the chance to share their groundbreaking work with their peers.
In 2025:
122
Total number of conferences attended by Khoury and Khoury-affiliated researchers
315
Total unique conference publications
125
Number of faculty who published/presented
2026 conference highlights from Khoury and Khoury-affiliated researchers
As the 2026 conference season gears up, take a look some Khoury-affiliated events and highlights.
Northeastern University and Khoury College at CHI
The ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of human-computer interaction, taking place this year from April 13–17 in Barcelona.
In 2026, for a third straight year, Khoury College faculty and student researchers, along with their collaborators in the College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD), the Bouvé College of Health Sciences, and the College of Engineering, set a new publishing benchmark at CHI, showcasing an impressive array of papers, late-breaking works, panels, special interest groups, and other works and events.
Five Khoury-affiliated works were recognized with honorable mentions, placing their work in the top five percent of accepted research:
2026 Honorable Mentions
Examining Interpretation Strategies for Multiple Forecast Visualizations with Two and Four Forecasts, whose authors include Lace M. Padilla, Racquel Fygenson, Connor Wilson, explored how people interpret multiple forecast visualizations under uncertainty, identifying patterns in forecast evaluation strategies that can help information designers communicate uncertainty more effectively.
Exploring the Future of AI in Clinical Collaboration: A Study on Tumor Board Case Preparation, authors of which include Khoury researchers Varun Mishra, Elizabeth D. Mynatt, and Jiachen Li, explored whether LLMs can help groups of medical specialists called Multidisciplinary Tumor Boards (MTB) get up to speed more quickly. They did so by equipping 16 MTB oncologists with two AI systems, Microsoft’s Copilot, and the specialized system Healthcare Agent Orchestrator (HAO), finding that physicians–who preferred HAO–were skeptical of AI-recommended therapies, but overconfident about AI-generated summaries.
From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing Asymptomatic AI Harms to Foster Dignified Human-AI Interaction, whose authors include Khoury assistant professor Upol Ehsan, reframes the “future of work” debate around workers themselves, finding through a year-long study with cancer specialists that AI’s early productivity gains masked a gradual erosion of expert judgment — what the researchers call “intuition rust.”
MIND: Empowering Mental Health Clinicians with Multimodal Data Insights through a Narrative Dashboard, whose authors include Khoury researchers Varun Mishra, Lace M. Padilla, and Dakuo Wang, explores how MIND, an AI-powered dashboard that translates patient data from wearables, smartphones, and clinical notes into plain-language narratives, significantly outperformed standard methods in both uncovering hidden clinical insights and supporting real-world decision-making.
Playing the Imitation Game: How Perceived Generated Content Shapes Player Experience, authored by Seth Cooper and Mahsa Bazzaz, explores how people experience AI-generated and procedurally generated content, especially in games. To investigate, they ran a mixed-method survey on the games Super Mario Bros. and Sokoban, comparing procedurally generated levels and levels designed by humans to explore how perceptions of the creator relate to players’ overall experience of gameplay.
Khoury College at CHI through the years
Khoury College at SIGCSE TS
The Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS) is the flagship conference of the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE).
The 2026 SIGCSE conference took place in February, with 24 Khoury and Khoury-affiliated researchers attending.
Best Paper winner: Creating a Second Pathway to the Computing Major,
whose authors include Carla Brodley, Northeastern University’s dean of inclusive computing, chronicled the development of UC Riverside’s CS 9 course series, which creates an alternative entry point into the computing major for students without a traditional CS background, broadening participation in the field.
