Jin-Hee Cho has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their research careers. The 105 winners will receive their awards at a Washington, DC ceremony this spring. Jin-Hee received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Virginia Tech, under the advising of Ing-Ray Chen.
Dr. Cho is currently a computer scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland. Her research interests include network security, trust and risk management, cognitive modeling, and network science. She received the best paper awards in IEEE TrustCom09 and BRIMS13. She is a recipient of the 2015 IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize in the field of Communications Networking. She is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of ACM.
Dr. Cho is looking to extend her research in two potential directions: (1) trust to enhance autonomy in tactical environments; and (2) trust to facilitate opinion spreading in distributed environments. First, autonomy in tactical networks is a critical aspect for a distributed system to be highly reconfigurable, agile, and scalable in the presence of hostile entities. Although the role of trust in enhancing autonomy has been discussed in other domains such as bioethics, social psychology, and sociology, it has not been fully addressed in tactical networks whose characteristics introduce many difficult design challenges including high dynamicity, hostility, tempo, and uncertainty. Dr. Cho’s trust research can be extended to provide solutions for autonomous systems in the Army settings that consider heterogeneous entities including both humans and machines. Second, as social network/media services (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) become more popular than ever, social network analysis that seeks to infer trust relationships (e.g., by investigating patterns in relationships, interactions, and opinion flows) can provide crucial insights, which can be used to predict and control critical aspects of decision-making processes. These two areas can be smoothly extended from Dr. Cho’s current research efforts, which are also well aligned with ARL and DoD mission areas.
