The strength of the College of IST is demonstrated through the successes and accomplishments of its students, faculty, alumni, and programs. Read more about how the college and its people are driving innovative change and taking on the challenges of the Information Age.
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After starting a company whose proceeds benefited Venezuelans living in poverty and working in a number of startups in various industries, College of Information Sciences and Technology student Izaak Lustgarten landed a summer position with Bank of America as a global quantitative analytics intern. In his role, he analyzes data to help the bank make informed decisions for its digital banking.
Like many interns over the past 16 months, Penn State senior Katie Byrd expected her internship with Universal Health Services Inc. to be entirely virtual. But after her first week, she gave up her quiet, virtual workspace in exchange for a fast-paced hospital environment when public health guidelines allowed for a switch to an in-person experience.
The College of Information Sciences and Technology will honor Alayna Spriggle as student marshal for its summer 2021 commencement, which will be held at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 14, at the Bryce Jordan Center.
As online fake news detectors and spam filters become more sophisticated, so do attackers’ methods to trick them — including attacks through the “universal trigger.” In this learning-based method, an attacker uses a phrase or set of words to fool an indefinite number of inputs, which could lead to more fake news appearing in your social media feed or spam reaching your email inbox.
Shubham Mishra, a rising sophomore studying data sciences in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, believed that if he was hardworking and willing to find an internship, he could be hired even though he had only just completed his first year at Penn State. As a summer data analyst intern in the information technology department at Intelligent Direct, Inc., he’s getting a fast start on building experience for his future career.
A compilation of recent news, highlights and achievements from the College of Information Sciences and Technology community.
The Graduate School announces the Penn State alumni who have been elected to serve a three-year term on the Graduate School Alumni Society Board of Directors beginning July 1.
Penn State students Bill Chen and Howard Hong are working with a team of fellow students to make sure that during a crisis no one else feels alone by developing an active listening application called PsySpace while competing in the Nittany AI Challenge.
At the College of Information Sciences and Technology, doctoral student Jeongwon Jo has benefited from having access to an interdisciplinary network of experts and scholars to help advance her research. And because of those collaborations and mentors, in part, Jo and her co-authors earned the Best Paper Award at the Communications and Technologies 2021 conference for the first paper she’s published since she began her doctoral program at Penn State.
How does modern digital technology shape our world and our perceptions? That is a question investigated by students in an emerging issues and technologies course this spring in the College of Information Sciences and Technology. Structured around a text by Martin Heidegger titled The Question Concerning Technology, students were given opportunities throughout the semester to post thought-provoking discussion questions and present their viewpoints.
The Penn State Center for Security Research and Education is announcing its Fall 2021 Grant Program to support security-related scholarship and educational programs at Penn State. University faculty and researchers are eligible to apply by Sept. 30.
Jacob Meissner never imagined he’d work in technology after obtaining his bachelor’s degree in English from Penn State. But a side job working for computer support at the University quickly opened his eyes to the countless opportunities available within the field — and led him to his current role as director of security engineering for Disney Streaming.
Erica Mi, a rising junior at Penn State, is working for IBM this summer as part of a project management internship — the latest endeavor she’s exploring during an ambitious college career.
When it comes to what users share on Twitter, women and users who never attended college voluntarily disclose more personal information than users from other socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds — potentially making these populations more susceptible to online privacy threats, according to a recent study led by the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.
When Nia Anderson started thinking of career paths as she nears graduation, she saw herself as a business analyst. Through the support and knowledge of her virtual summer IT Innovation internship with PepsiCo, and a growing interest in artificial intelligence, she now wants to take a path within data science.
As a member of the College of Information Sciences and Technology’s first graduating class and a long-time alumni volunteer, Steve Pipino has established the Pipino Family Annually Funded Scholarship in the college to benefit first-generation students and students with demonstrated need.
Penn State senior Jason Nucciarone is using the skills he gained through the human centered design and development program at the College of Information Sciences and Technology to make technology more efficient for users.
The Presidential Leadership Academy at Penn State recently announced its Class of 2021.
Assistant Professor Daniel Susser has been awarded the Haile Family Early Career Professorship in Information Sciences and Technology. The endowed position supports standout faculty members to foster a commitment to teaching, provide funds for emerging research, and offer recognition for their accomplishments.
Shaowen Bardzell, professor of information sciences and technology, has been elected as executive vice-president for the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI), the premier international society for all professionals, academics and students interested in human-computer interaction.
A $1.2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant will help researchers build a search engine and create other resources for scientists who need to scour billions of online documents to improve online privacy.
A research group from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology is well-represented at the virtual 10th International Conference on Communities and Technology, which began June 21. Five papers from the Center for Human-Computer Interaction were accepted to the conference, representing 20% of the papers program.
A Penn State team of researchers found that clickbait often did not perform any better and, in some cases, performed worse than traditional headlines. They also found that artificial intelligence systems designed to spot clickbait struggled with the task.
Penn State researchers, with funding from the Mental Research Institute, are developing a smartphone app to promote positive, engaged family relationships that support healthy development for adolescents.
Researchers from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology made a methodological contribution toward a potential answer to the challenging problem of how to operationalize posthuman concepts into practice for human-computer interaction through the art of noticing — specifically, observing birds to reimagine their relationship to the natural world as designers of technologies.
Chris Gamrat, instructional designer at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, is co-author on a chapter in the new book Microlearning in the Digital Age: The Design and Delivery of Learning in Snippet by Routledge.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, essential workers tweeted less often than general users about COVID-19 but more about overall mental health issues, according to researchers at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology. Additionally, essential workers’ overall tweets were more positive compared to general users, the researchers found.
Jiawei Han, Michael Aiken Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will present a talk as part of the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Lecture Series at 11:30 a.m. on June 14 via Zoom. In the talk, Han will discuss his work to explore the power of taxonomy and embedding in text mining.
As a child growing up in Nepal, Bikalpa Neupane never thought he would come to the U.S. for a college education, much less a graduate degree. Now, as a doctoral candidate in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, Neupane has developed an AI-driven platform that matches international students with mentors to help them through the college application process.
With a new grant from the National Institutes of Health, an interdisciplinary team of researchers aims to examine police radio communications to observe what happens during adverse encounters between police officers and male minority youth and study any patterns of interaction that may lead to unfortunate or tragic outcomes.
Penn State University Libraries presented its fourth annual Undergraduate Research Award: Excellence in Information Literacy honors to 100 students at nearly all undergraduate Penn State campuses. Awards recognized 96 current undergraduate students and recent graduates, four graduate students, plus two additional College of Medicine students and two collaborating faculty members participating in campus-wide virtual research exhibition events.
A new seminar series that aims to initiate a dialog between healthcare practitioners, clinical researchers, and artificial intelligence and data science experts on strategies for realizing the promise and potential of AI in healthcare starts June 8.
Penn State faculty members James Wang, professor of information sciences and technology, and Rui Zhang, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, each received a 2020 Amazon Research Award, which was announced publicly in April of this year.
Penn State alumna Jayme Anne Goldberg is the founder of Consequential Flowers, a social media network designed to help female students and young professionals develop impactful leadership skills.
Philip S. Yu, distinguished professor and the Wexler Chair in Information Technology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will kick off the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Lecture Series at 11 a.m. Thursday, May 27 on Zoom. Yu’s talk will focus on network heterogeneity on graph neural networks.
Penn State University Libraries and the Schreyer Honors College recognized the 10th annual finalist presentations and winner of the recently endowed Robert F. Guentter Jr. Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award on May 6, immediately following the three finalists’ remote presentations. Finalists represented the College of Agricultural Sciences, the College of Information Sciences and Technology, and the College of the Liberal Arts.
Cutting-edge agricultural technology has advanced in recent years, introducing innovations from self-driving tractors and laser scarecrows to robotic bees that aid in pollination. What could technologists learn from alternative agricultural movements, such as permaculture and eco farming, which seek to reimagine the relationships between humans, non-humans and land? Researchers at Penn State are finding out.
The College of Engineering has announced the winners of the spring Learning Factory Capstone Design Project Showcase, which took place virtually for the second year in a row. More than 700 students representing majors from the colleges of Engineering, Earth and Mineral Sciences, and Information Sciences and Technology participated.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a struggle for many students. But for Kareem Jelks, the pandemic has fueled his passion to help others, especially those in underserved communities. Jelks, who earned a degree in cybersecurity analytics and operations from the College of Information Sciences and Technology last week, has spent the past year creating software that helps minority populations with healthcare needs.
On May 13, the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence hosted "AI in a Post-COVID World," a virtual conference that will brought together experts from a variety of disciplines to discuss how artificial intelligence has aided in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data science can only be data science for good when it can be data science for all. That was the message of a recent symposium, “Harnessing the Data Revolution to Enhance Diversity,” which explored the issues of — and opportunities in — using data science to improve equity and diversity in academia and in society.
Social media has become a platform for new mothers to openly share their experiences of the joys and challenges of parenthood. Researchers at Penn State and Dalhousie University have unraveled the sentiments in nursing mothers’ tweets to better understand the factors influencing breastfeeding behaviors, which they hope can inform policies and improve resources for mothers.
Penn State researchers recently participated in the Consortium of Social Science Association’s annual Social Science Advocacy Day, meeting virtually with Congress and their staff during this annual event.
After a romantic breakup, there are often decisions to be made regarding the partners’ shared possessions, such as who takes the house and who gets the cat, and who keeps the friends. But when it comes to navigating a breakup in the digital age, a clean break isn’t necessarily as clear cut, according to Penn State alumnus Anthony Pinter.
2021 marks the 20th celebration of LGBTQ+ graduates during the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity’s Lavender Recognition ceremony.
When Porter Jenkins came to Penn State to pursue a doctorate in marketing, he never imagined he’d one day have a full-time career in academics, teaching and conducting research on data sciences and machine learning.
Penn State researchers have developed an Amazon Alexa skill to remotely deliver validated interventions to metastatic breast cancer patients in the comfort of their own homes. Named Nurse AMIE, which stands for Addressing Metastatic Individuals Everyday, the platform is aimed at providing supportive care interventions to supplement medical treatment and improve the quality of life for its users.
Penn State has launched an expanded initiative in Artificial Intelligence (AI), termed the AI Hub, which will bring together the University’s considerable resources and talent in AI to further advance its position as a global leader developing fundamental innovations in AI, in using AI and machine learning (ML) to solve the hardest challenges, and to create unique applications of AI and ML in unforeseen areas.
A newly founded, interdisciplinary research center established to further foundational and applied artificial intelligence in engineered systems will be housed in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Penn State College of Engineering.
A new research center, the Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations and Scientific Applications, or CENSAI, will unite Penn State researchers to explore the use of artificial intelligence as a tool to dramatically accelerate the scientific process, an initiative that the center’s organizers say could rapidly accelerate scientific progress.