News Archive

CMU News

March 2025

Coty Gonzalez has been elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. The fellow distinction is a lifetime honor achievement within the organization, which promotes the use of science, technology, engineering and mathematics to solve current issues.

CMU News

March 2025

For Women's History Month, Carnegie Mellon University is featuring the work of women across the STEM fields, including DDMLab Director Coty Gonzalez! Read how these woman promote mentorship, outreach, and career success at CMU!

CMU News

October 2024

DDMLab members were in action at the Summit for AI Institutes Leadership! This meeting highlighted the significant impact of AI institutes across various sectors. It showcased pioneering research that applies artificial intelligence to agriculture, education, national security, health and many other fields.

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences News

October 2024

We and our collaborators found that games provide an effective alternative to deliver diversity training, upping the ante by simulating social situations involving bias and including “personality” bots to hone in on how unconscious bias can affect our social context.

Carnegie Mellon University News

May 2023

Led by Carnegie Mellon University, the AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (AI-SDM) will improve the response to societal challenges such as disaster management and public health by creating human-centric AI tools to assist with critical decisions. The institute will also develop interdisciplinary training to bolster effective and rapid response in uncertain and dynamic situations. Coty will serve as the institute's research co-director.

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

May 2023

Led by Carnegie Mellon University, the AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (AI-SDM) will improve the response to societal challenges such as disaster management and public health by creating human-centric AI tools to assist with critical decisions. The institute will also develop interdisciplinary training to bolster effective and rapid response in uncertain and dynamic situations.

CMU School of Computer Science

May 2023

Carnegie Mellon University to lead NSF AI Institute for Societal Decision Making. This $20M collaboration brings together AI researchers, social scientists to develop tools for societal challenges.

University of Malaga

February 2023

DDMLab director Coty Gonzalez is one of four visiting professors serving the semester at the University of Malaga in Spain. This collaboration between the Commission for Cultural, Educational and Scientific Exchange between Spain and the United States (Fulbright) will promote research and teaching collaborations across the Atlantic!

Machine Learning University-ExplAIn

August 2022

Lab member Erin Bugbee's work on understanding logistic regression, conducted at MLU-ExplAIn, an education initiative from Amazon designed to teach machine learning theory and practical application, was recently featured online. Congratulations Erin!

NewsBreak

June 29, 2022

DDMLab research demonstrating that signaling, a strategic method used to make something appear to be something it is not, can be effective at combating cyber attacks, was recently featured in an article on the website of Science of Security and Privacy.

NewsBreak

June 27, 2022

DDMLab research on cognitive bias was recently cited in a NewsBreak article on the distortions in judgments and decisions people use in dynamic environments.

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

November 08, 2021

Coty Gonzalez's new course, Decision Models and Games (88-312), has been recently featured as part of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences unique opportunities for 2022.

Wall Street Journal

September 07, 2021

DDMLab research on phishing was recently featured in this Wall Street Journal article on how cybercriminals take advantage of the unconscious processes that we all use to make decision making more efficient.

CMU News

March 20, 2021

Coty Gonzalez was one of a number of CMU experts who shared their thoughts on the best applications for advancements made in the past year, preparations for a post-pandemic landscape and how lessons learned can inform the future.

CyLab

March 8, 2021

Lujo Bauer, Matt Fredrikson, and Cleotilde Gonzalez are part of a team of researchers that was named a winner of a prestigious US Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Award.

CyberBitsEtc

March 8, 2021

Coty Gonzalez was one of five women featured by CyberBitsEtc.org for International Women's Day. CyberBitsEtc.org's aim is to provide the community of practitioners with leading ideas and news about the world of cyber security, cyber defense, as well as about new approaches, which help people better understand cyber spaces.

Cognitive Science Society

December 10, 2020

Coty Gonzalez has been elected a lifetime Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society. This is a great honor to Coty's career built through the years thanks to the contributions from each of the members of the DDMLab.

CyLab

October 8, 2020

Work on cyber defense from Coty Gonzalez, Palvi Aggarwal, and Kuldeep Singh was recently featured in the following article.

Security Intelligence

July 20, 2020

Coty Gonzalez was interviewed for a recent article in Security Intelligence on how cyber ranges can help train IT professionals.

Cylab

March 16, 2020

Work by Coty Gonzalez and DDMLab members on software updates and why people delay them has been recently featured in this article.

HICSS 2020

January 10, 2020

At the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences Cleotilde Gonzalez, Palvi Aggarwal, and colleagues presented two papers, one of which won a Best Paper Award. Palvi also gave a talk on her cybersecurity work.

CyLab Security and Privacy Institute News

January 08, 2020

This article discusses two cybersecurity papers authored by Cleotilde Gonzalez and DDMLab colleges that were presented at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

HFES 2019

November 5, 2019

At the 63rd International Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Cleotilde Gonzalez, a research professor of decision science, participated in a panel on human-machine teaming, Kuldeep Singh gave a talk on phishing detection, and Palvi Aggarwal presented a poster.

CMU DARPA Grant

October 15, 2019

The team of Anita Woolley, Coty Gonzalez, and Henny Admoni have received a DARPA grant of $2.8 million to enhance machine-human team collaborations.

Webroot Phishing Report

September 24, 2019

Over the last few months, Coty Gonzalez, a research professor of decision science, participated with Webroot, a cybersecuirty company, interpreting results from an international phishing survey. The press release is available now.

Computational Cybersecuirty in Compromised Environments (C3E)

September 16-18, 2019

At the Computational Cybersecurity in Compromised Environments (C3E), Cleotilde Gonzalez, a research professor of decision science, gave an invited talk and Dr. Palvi Aggarwal, a postdoctoral fellow, participated in the Cognitive Security Track Session.

Summer School in Collective Intelligence: Theories and Applications

September 9-13, 2019

Cleotilde Gonzalez, a research professor of decision science, was invited to speak at the Summer School in Collective Intelligence: Theories and Applications in Bari Italy.

Army Research Laboratory Boot Camp

June 13-14, 2019

Researchers from the Army Research Laboratory visited Carnegie Mellon University to discuss the ongoing research under the ARL-CRA project, strengthen the collaboration between ARL and various universities to work in the direction of realistic cybersecurity solution.

CyLab Security and Privacy Institute News

April 22, 2019

At the annual Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) Conference Coty Gonzalez, a research professor in the department of Social and Decision Sciences, and Dr. Palvi Aggarwal, a postdoctoral fellow in the same department, gave a presentation about the art of deception, and how it's used in attack decisions using cybersecurity scenarios.

Carnegie Mellon University News

March 26, 2019

Women in cybersecurity, from those in senior roles to the next wave of female technologists, will meet in Pittsburgh this week to share knowledge and experience, network and mentor during the sixth annual Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) Conference. Cleotilde Gonzalez, research professor in Social and Decision Sciences, will present Saturday morning.

Carnegie Mellon University Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

January, 2019

Cleotilde Gonzalez, research professor of decision science and founding director of the Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, has been elected to the 12-member governing board of the Cognitive Science Society.

TechRepublic

April 17, 2018

"Psychological research on human adversarial behavior is necessary to uncover factors that determine how deception and phishing strategies originally manifest in phishing emails."

SecurityBrief Asia

February 28, 2018

Researchers probe psychology behind phishing attacks. What makes the difference between a successful phishing attack and an unsuccessful one? Researchers Prashanth Rajivan and Cleotilde Gonzalez discovered substantial findings while analyzing what phishing strategies are used and how they are implemented.

MediaPost

February 28, 2018

Lessons From The Dark Side: Phishing Tricks For Honest Email Marketers. What can legitimate business people learn from the top phishing tactics

Carnegie Mellon University Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

February 26, 2018

Phishing attacks: Researchers identify how criminals’ strategies may lead to success or failure. Prashanth Rajivan and Cleotilde Gonzalez present a new methodology to study the important but often ignored aspect of phishing: adversarial behavior.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

February 6, 2018

CMU researchers are building a model to predict human behavior. Christian Lebiere, Coty Gonzalez and David Plaut are developing the simulation for the SocialSim project which aims to create an accurate, scaled simulation of online social behavior. The project is funded by a $6.7 million grant over four years from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Carnegie Mellon University Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

December 21, 2017

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has allocated more than $6.7 million to a team of researchers, including Christian Lebiere, Coty Gonzalez and and David Plaut from Carnegie Mellon University, to fund research into improving the understanding of how social information travels and transforms online.

Association for Psychological Science

October 31, 2017

Behavioral scientists Cleotilde (Coty) González and Nancy Cooke are part of a major new research effort to study the psychology of deception in order to counter Advanced Persistent Threat attacks.

Carnegie Mellon University Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

May 3rd, 2017

Using psychology and decision making to study cybersecurity, Prof. Gonzalez was mentioned in the MURI Grant News.

NIST Forensics 2016

November 2016

Prof. Gonzalez gave a talk at the 2016 NIST Forensics on the human factors of forensic sciences and identification decisions. Check out the last video for Prof. Gonzalez’s talk.

The Best Schools

September 2016

Social Sciences at CMU are ranked #19 by The Best Schools.org based on Shanghai rankings. Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory is mentioned.

United States Army Research Laboratory

February 12, 2016

U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University are pursuing a novel way (STIDS) to use technology that eases the detection burden on analysists that monitor networks around the clock.

The Psychology Times

September 1, 2015

Dr. Jason Harman, a psychological scientist with a background in human decision-making has joined the faculty at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge campus.

Ohio University

April 2, 2015

Psychology Alum Selected for Max Planck Summer Institute, Faculty Position

The Piper

July 17, 2014

Cleotilde (Coty) Gonzalez has been selected to serve on the Human Factors Committee of the Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) within the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology.

NIST.gov

July 16, 2014

NIST Names Members of Forensic Science Resource Committees: The Human Factors Committee will provide guidance throughout the OSAC on the influence of systems design on human performance and on ways to mitigate errors in complex tasks.

Dietrich College News

October 2013

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are part of a collaborative research alliance led by Penn State University that has been awarded a ten-year, $48.2 million collaboration by the Army Research Laboratory to develop a new science of how to make security-relevant decisions in cyberspace.

HFES News

November 2012

Key to protecting online operations is a high degree of "cyber security awareness," according to human factors/ergonomics researchers Varun Dutt, Young-Suk Ahn, and Cleotilde Gonzalez.

truthout

October 2011

It turns out that a lot of people make this kind of mistake. Difficulty understanding stocks and flows may be a fundamental cognitive error such as anchoring or availability bias. In one experiment by Matthew Cronin, Cleotilde Gonzalez, and John Sterman, more than half of a group of students at MIT Sloan - one of the top business schools in the country - could not figure out, from a chart of entrances to and exits from a department store, when the most and fewest people were in the store.

H&SS News

December 2010

Cleotilde (Coty) Gonzalez, an associate research professor of social and decision sciences that studies conflict resolution from a behavioral and computational approach, spent five days working with the Peres Center for Peace in Israel looking for an answer.

Nightly Business Report

October 2010

Market Entry Prediction Competition

October 2010

Twenty-two different teams participated in the competition. The total number of submissions was 25. The winners are Wei Chen, Chih-Han Chen, Yi-Shan Lee, and Shu-Yu Liu from National Taiwan University. The runners up are Tomas Lejarraga, Varun Dutt, and Cleotilde Gonzalez from Carnegie Mellon University.

Penn State Live

July 2009

Researcher receives $6 million to study cyber awareness: Liu and his team received a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Award (MURI) for his project, "computer-aided human centric cyber situation awareness." They plan to use the grant funding to further the research on cyber awareness and how it can be used to improve cyber defense.

8 1/2 x 11 Newsletter

June 2009

Cleotilde Gonzalez, associate research professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences and director of the Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, recently spoke to a large group of faculty in computer science, psychology and management at the Wyzsza Szkola Biznesu (National-Louis University) in Nowy Sacz, Poland.

System Dynamics Conference

October 2008

The first presentation was made by Varun Dutt on a paper titled Human Perceptions of Climate Change, co-authored by Cleotilde Gonzalez. Both are from the Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. One of the main hypotheses which guided their study was that human negligence towards issues affecting the climate system is a result of human cognitive inabilities.

Akhbar

Summer/Fall 2008

As the granddaughter of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, senior business administration student Hala Abbas has intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet she faced many challenges while playing PeaceMaker, an educational video game inspired by real events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that challenges players to succeed as a leader on both sides.

Carnegie Mellon News

November 2007

A Carnegie Mellon University professor is using the PeaceMaker video game - which calls on players to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - to study how a person's background and knowledge of the conflict influences how they negotiate a solution.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

November 2007

On the global well-being front, a Carnegie Mellon University professor is using the PeaceMaker video game, in which players attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to examine how knowledge of the conflict affects the ways that people negotiate.

Poder y Negocios

October 2007

Spanish-language publication featuring a profile of Prof. Cleotilde Gonzalez.

The Tartan

2003

Foreign-born professors come and stay at CMU: Carnegie Mellon University draws its pool of talent from all over the world. Many of the most well-known and respected professors at the University are originally from a foreign country.

Carnegie Mellon News

2001

Students in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences' Information Systems program spent the fall semester donating about $1 million of their expertise to help non-profit agencies create computer systems that will enable them to provide needed programs and services.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

December 2000

CMU brain power boosts charities: Professor Cleotilde Gonzales, who taught the course, estimated that the students donated about $1 million in time and work to the participating nonprofit groups, which included North Hills Community Outreach, the Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium, Operation Safety Net, Light of Life Ministries and Fallingwater.