Education

• Ph.D in Computer Science, Virginia Tech, 2028 (expected)
• M.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Tech, 2023
• M.A. in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences, Columbia University, 2019
• B.A. in Economics, Education, Emory University, 2017

Work Experience

• AI Researcher
  • Affiliation: Republic of Korea Army
  • Dates: January 2020 - July 2021

Research Projects

• Using Intelligent Conversational Agents to Empower Adolescents to be Resilient Against Cybergrooming

  • Funding: National Science Foundation (NSF)
  • Dates: Fall 2024 - Present
  • Principal Investigators: Jin-Hee Cho, Pamela J. Wisniewski, Lifu Huang, Sang Won Lee
  • Website: Link

• SPARK: Safe Parks And Roads for Kids

  • Funding: Healthy Communities Action Team (HCAT), Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth (VFHY)
  • Dates: Fall 2026 - Present
  • Principal Investigators: Jin-Hee Cho, Junghwan Kim

• AI-Powered Solution for Cyber Scam Prevention: Empowering Community Support for Older Adults

  • Funding: Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Southwest Virginia (CCI SWVA) and OpenAI
  • Dates: Fall 2025 - Summer 2026
  • Principal Investigators: Jin-Hee Cho, Junghwan Kim
  • Website: Link

• Cyber-Resilient Teen LLM Interactions: Preventing Privacy Leakage and Harm Escalation via Rewrite-Based Guardrails

  • Funding: Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Southwest Virginia (CCI SWVA)
  • Dates: Summer 2026
  • Principal Investigator: Jin-Hee Cho

Honors & Awards

• GPSS Travel Fund Program, Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society (AIES-26)
• Domestic student travel grant, The 27th Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2026)
• 2026 CCI SWVA Cyber Innovation Scholar, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Southwest Virginia (CCI SWVA)
• Virginia Tech CS Departmental Travel Grant, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Symposium 2026
• Travel Award, ACM The Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC 2026)
• Travel Award, ACM The Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC 2025)

Service

• Program Commitee, The 41st Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence Special Track on AI Alignment (AAAI-27)
• Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
• Program Commitee, Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society (AIES-26)
• Student Volunteer, The 27th Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2026)

Teaching

• Fall 2024: CS 3654 - Introductory Data Analytics and Visualization (Graduate Teaching Assistant)
• Spring 2025: CS 5804 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Graduate Teaching Assistant)

Publications

• Qi Zhang, Heajun An, Prakriti Dumaru, Sang Won Lee, Lifu Huang, Pamela J Wisniewski, Jin-Hee Cho (2026). "DeepSAGE: Stage-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Structured CBT Counseling Dialogue." arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.22615. [Link]
• Heajun An, Qi Zhang, Minqian Liu, Xinyi Zhang, Sang Won Lee, Lifu Huang, Pamela J. Wisniewski, and Jin-Hee Cho (2026). "StagePilot: Stage-Level Planning for Long-Horizon Dialogue Simulation in Cybergrooming." arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.05060. [Link]
• Heajun An, Hossein Salemi, Qi Zhang, Hemant Purohit, Jin-Hee Cho (2026). "Explainable AI for Cyberscam Prevention: A Survey of Multimodal Scam Detection, Evaluation, and Human-Centered Training." Evaluation, and Human-Centered Training (June 14, 2026) [Link]
• Heajun An, Connor Ng, Sandesh Sharma Dulal, Junghwan Kim and Jin-Hee Cho (2026). "Grounded but Misleading: Evaluating Semantic Alignment in AI-Generated Security Explanations." arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.05056. [Link]
• Heajun An, Qi Zhang, Vedanth Achanta, and Jin-Hee Cho (2026). "CR4T: Rewrite-Based Guardrails for Adolescent LLM Safety." arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.21609. [Link]
• Xinyi Zhang, Mamtaj Akter, Heajun An, Minqian Liu, Qi Zhang, Lifu Huang, Jin-Hee Cho, Pamela J. Wisniewski, Sang Won Lee (2026). "From Vulnerable to Resilient: Examining Parent and Teen Perceptions on How to Respond to Unwanted Cybergrooming Advances" Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026). [Link]
• Prakriti Dumaru, Xinyi Zhang, Heajun An, Minqian Liu, Qi Zhang, Lifu Huang, Jin-Hee Cho, Sang Won Lee, Pamela J. Wisniewski (2026). "Dual-Use LLMs in Adolescent Online Safety: From Dangerous Persuaders to Cybergrooming Education." Position Paper, CHI 2026 Workshop: The Developmentally Safe Generative AI Environment for Youth. Available at SSRN 6789698. [Link]
• Minqian Liu, Zhiyang Xu, Xinyi Zhang, Heajun An, Sarvech Qadir, Qi Zhang, Pamela J. Wisniewski, Jin-Hee Cho, Sang Won Lee, Ruoxi Jia, and Lifu Huang (2025). "LLM Can Be a Dangerous Persuader: Empirical Study of Persuasion Safety in Large Language Models." Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2025). [Link]
• Heajun An, Marcos Silva, Qi Zhang, Arav Singh, Minqian Liu, Xinyi Zhang, Sarvech Qadir, Sang Won Lee, Lifu Huang, Pamela J. Wisniewski, and Jin-Hee Cho (2025). "Toward Integrated Solutions: A Systematic Interdisciplinary Review of Cybergrooming Research." arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.05727. [Link]

Talks

• Grounded but Misleading: Evaluating Semantic Alignment in AI-Generated Security Explanations, Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society (AIES-26), Malmo, Sweden, October 13, 2026
• StagePilot: Stage-Level Planning for Long-Horizon Dialogue Simulation in Cybergrooming, The 27th Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL’26), Atlanta, GA, USA, August 03, 2026
• A2CL: AI-Augmented Cognitive Learning for Adaptive Anti-Scam Training in Older Adults, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Symposium, Richmond, VA, USA, April 14, 2026
• AI-Powered Solution for Cyber Scam Prevention: Empowering Community Support for Older Adults, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Student Researcher Showcase, Blacksburg, VA, USA, April 01, 2026
• StagePilot: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Agent for Stage-Controlled Cybergrooming Simulation, ACM Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC 2026), Washington, DC, USA, March 27, 2026
• GUARD: Grooming Understanding and Action via Reinforcement-based Defense, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Student Researcher Showcase, Blacksburg, VA, USA, April 04, 2025
• GUARD: A Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning Chatbot for Cybergrooming Prevention, ACM Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC 2025), Washington, DC, USA, March 29, 2025