Maha Sajid

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Virginia Tech, advised by Brendan David-John and Bo Ji. I am affiliated with the PrivateEye Lab and SNAIL Lab.

My research examines human attention and team cognition in collaborative extended reality: how people allocate attention, develop shared situational awareness, and coordinate under changing task demands. I combine eye tracking, multimodal behavioral analysis, and controlled human-subject studies with the design of networked XR prototypes. My current work investigates gaze-based measures and predictive models of individual and team attention, with the longer-term goal of designing immersive systems that better support collaborative decision-making.

I also study security and privacy in mixed reality, including how people recognize attacks in shared virtual spaces and how privacy indicators can better support bystanders.

Research Interests: Multimodal Behavioral Modeling · Eye Tracking · Human Attention · Collaborative XR · Team Cognition · Human-Centered Security & Privacy

The best way to reach me is at mahas@vt.edu.

News

Year	Update
2026	Awarded the scholarship to attend the TAPIA 2026 conference in Atlanta, GA.
2026	Awarded the John Lee Pratt Fellowship for 2026–2027 and serving as a reviewer for IEEE VR.
2026	Earned the CRA UR2PhD Certified Graduate Mentor credential.
2025	Featured by Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Southwest Virginia in a researcher spotlight on my work in collaborative mixed-reality security.
2025	Co-authored work on multimodal privacy indicators for situationally impaired XR bystanders at IEEE ISMAR Adjunct 2025.
2025	Presented “Just stop doing everything for now!”: Understanding Security Attacks in Remote Collaborative Mixed Reality at the CCI Symposium 2025 in Richmond, Virginia.
2025	Selected as a CCI Southwest Virginia Cyber Innovation Scholar for FY25, following selection in FY24.
2025	Published first-author work on security attacks in remote collaborative mixed reality at IEEE VR 2025; the work was featured in Computerworld.
2023	Joined Virginia Tech as a PhD student and Graduate Research Assistant.

Selected Publications

2025

IEEE VR

"Just stop doing everything for now!": Understanding security attacks in remote collaborative mixed reality

Maha Sajid, Syed Ibrahim Mustafa Shah Bukhari, Bo Ji, and 1 more author

In 2025 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)Featured in Computerworld and ACM TechNews. , 2025

DOI arXiv Bib HTML

@inproceedings{sajid2025security,
  title = {{"Just stop doing everything for now!": Understanding security attacks in remote collaborative mixed reality}},
  author = {Sajid, Maha and Bukhari, Syed Ibrahim Mustafa Shah and Ji, Bo and David-John, Brendan},
  booktitle = {2025 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)},
  pages = {623--633},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  doi = {10.1109/VR59515.2025.00085},
}

ISMAR Adj.

Rethinking Privacy Indicators in Extended Reality: Multimodal Design for Situationally Impaired Bystanders

Syed Ibrahim Mustafa Shah Bukhari, Maha Sajid, Bo Ji, and 1 more author

In 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct), 2025

DOI arXiv Bib HTML

@inproceedings{bukhari2025privacy,
  title = {Rethinking Privacy Indicators in Extended Reality: Multimodal Design for Situationally Impaired Bystanders},
  author = {Bukhari, Syed Ibrahim Mustafa Shah and Sajid, Maha and Ji, Bo and David-John, Brendan},
  booktitle = {2025 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct)},
  pages = {265--272},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  doi = {10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct68609.2025.00059},
}