Our paper titled “Detecting Visual Information Manipulation Attacks in Augmented Reality: A Multimodal Semantic Reasoning Approach” has been recognized with the Best Paper Award at IEEE ISMAR 2025, the premier XR conference. Heartfelt congratulations to the lead author, PhD student Yanming Xiu, who also received the 2025 IEEE ISMAR Doctoral Consortium Best Presentation and the Best Paper Award from a workshop co-located with IEEE ISMAR, IEEE Universal Augmented Interaction Workshop. Way to go Yanming! 
Yanming’s work, funded by the Defense Applied Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and by the National Science Foundation (NSF), demonstrates how we can make next-generation AR safer by employing modern large multimodal models for monitoring whether AR-generated virtual content modifies, in an inappropriate way, the state of the real world presented to the user in the AR interface.
This work paves way to solving one of the key challenges to adoption of AR in safety-critical contexts, and to widespread adoption of AR as a whole. It also serves as a great example of “AI for systems:” of how advances in AI can improve computer systems of the future.
About Maria Gorlatova
Dr. Maria Gorlatova is the Sternberg Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Her research centers on pervasive computing technologies, with a focus on spatial computing and next-generation augmented reality. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees (Summa Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She spent two years at Princeton University’s Electrical Engineering Department as an Associate Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Princeton University EDGE Lab. Dr. Gorlatova was named one of the N2Women Rising Stars and has received multiple awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications, and research awards from Meta, Cisco, and IBM. She served as the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023, the General Co-Chair of the 2025 NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing, and the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE SenSys 2025.
