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.
If you have a story idea or questions about IST news, contact the Office of Marketing and Communications.
Justin Silverman, who joined the College of Information Sciences and Technology last year as an assistant professor with a focus in biomedical statistics, made global headlines last summer for his study suggesting that 80% of U.S. COVID-19 cases went undetected in March 2020. Silverman recently talked to the college about his motivations and his research.
For College of Information Sciences and Technology student marshal Erin Flannery, Penn State gave her the opportunity to explore a number of diverse degree pathways and research activities. After exploring many topics of interest during her first year, she found that the programs within the College of IST would uniquely allow her to explore those interests through a multidisciplinary lens.
Have you recently turned to your mobile device or computer to find out if your cough, sniffle or fever could be caused by COVID-19? The online symptom checker you used may have advised you to stay home and call your medical provider if symptoms worsen, or perhaps told you that you may be eligible for COVID-19 testing. But why did it make the recommendation it did? And how should you know if you can trust it?
Like many college students across the country, Nick Alico saw his summer internship cut short last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. So he used his newfound time to address COVID-19 in a new light: as a data analytics intern for the Penn State Viral Imaginations: COVID-19 initiative — an online gallery and archive that showcases Pennsylvanians’ experiences during the pandemic.
Expanding on an established problem in mathematics and computer science known as fair cake-cutting — a metaphor for cutting a cake in a way that each participant receives a slice that they believes to be fair — Hadi Hosseini, assistant professor at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, and his team have introduced a novel concept of "multi-layered cake-cutting" to achieve fairness when distributing access time over multiple resources.
Bimal Balakrishnan, who spent seven years at the university as a master and doctoral degree student from 2001-08, credits the mentorship he received at the University for putting him on his life’s path. He is currently an associate professor and department chair in the Department of Architectural Studies, as well as the director of the Immersive Visualization Lab, at the University of Missouri.
Edward Frymoyer has received the Penn State Graduate School Alumni Society Lifetime Achievement Award. This award recognizes alumni who have achieved exceptional success throughout the course of their career and have demonstrated loyalty to the University and the Alumni Association.
When remote teaching and learning abruptly replaced traditional classroom instruction at the start of the pandemic, innovations and adaptations were introduced that could be considered to continue in post-pandemic education, according to experts from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.
For Angela Govila and Ankur Tarnacha, the College of Information Sciences and Technology is the foundation for everything they have. The two first met as students in 2003, and Tarnacha soon after asked Govila out for a cup of coffee. The rest, they say, is history.
The winning idea in the 2021 IdeaMakers Challenge, as part of Penn State Startup Week sponsored by PNC, was a digital subscription service to a database that helps dancers find hundreds of programs, schools and jobs to develop their skills. An interdisciplinary team of undergraduate students from the Smeal College of Business, the College of Information Sciences and Technology and the College of Engineering pitched the idea on March 24.
Screen time burnout? Many people are feeling it these days because of extended use of technology due to remote learning and remote working situations. But excessive screen time did not start with the COVID-19 pandemic, and one Nittany AI Challenge student team is virtually stepping into the user’s world to suggest a life-tech balance that is as easy as a walk in the park.
Penn State Startup Week powered by PNC culminated with a celebration of student entrepreneurs and innovators in technology, health, sustainability, the arts and global impact categories during the virtual student recognition reception on March 25.
To initiate productive conversations centered around policy and big tech, the Penn State Law, Policy, and Engineering initiative and the Penn State Science Policy Society student organization have collaborated to host a webinar, "Decoding Big Tech," on April 2.
The COVID-19 pandemic did not stop 644 students from around the world from participating in a virtual version of HackPSU. The 48-hour hackathon was held entirely online for 45 teams of students, some as close as University Park and others as far as West Bengal, India.
Shaowen Bardzell, professor of information sciences and technology, presented a keynote address on March 23 at the virtual New Materialist Informatics 2021 conference. The talk, titled “Muddled Theories and Vibrant Mud: Notes on a Career of Reading and Walking” engaged feminist new materialist, ecofeminist, posthumanist, and feminist utopian thinking on climate crises.
Bob and Susan Bardusch have made a gift to establish the Bardusch Family IdeaMakers Challenge Endowment at the College of Information Sciences and Technology. The endowment will support the IdeaMakers Challenge, an annual entrepreneurial pitch competition held annually as part of Penn State Startup Week powered by PNC and sponsored by IST.
In a new book, "Building Better Interfaces for Remote Autonomous Systems: An Introduction for Systems Engineers," authors from the College of Information Sciences and Technology present a broad review of important design frameworks and concepts of human-computer interaction so that systems engineers can make better decisions and better interfaces.
From Sunday morning news shows to on-air pregame commentary in sports, live telecasts draw viewers into real-time content on televisions around the world. But in these often-unscripted productions, what the audience sees is not always what the producer intends — especially in regard to equity of on-air time for subjects based on their race or gender.
The Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence recently announced the recipients of its inaugural round of seed funding. The center awarded more than $93,000 to five interdisciplinary research projects.
Researchers whose work addresses natural and cultural resource management topics can learn about partnering opportunities with federal agencies at the Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units Program Workshop on March 30.
Corey and Leteace Lee have established an educational equity scholarship in the College of Information Sciences and Technology to support students with financial need who are first-generation or from underrepresented backgrounds.
Penn State faculty pursuing research, education and outreach related to socially responsible AI are encouraged to apply for affiliate status with the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
“Be intentional.” “Remember your why.” “Be clear on who you are.” “You’re not alone.” Those were a few of the main takeaways shared by panelists with students during the first IST Alumni Identity Talks event, hosted virtually by the College of Information Sciences and Technology last month.
Did you ever wonder how social networking applications like Facebook and LinkedIn make recommendations on the people you should friend or pages you should follow? Researchers in the College of IST have developed a novel framework to lessen the bias in connection recommendations made by machine learning models in social networking applications.
Wash your hands. Stay six feet apart. Wear a mask. These are the messages that have been conveyed by public health officials for the past year to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The directions are simple enough to understand, but would they be easier to follow if the reasons behind them were clearer? A special-topics IST course this spring is exploring this question.
Noah Snavely, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and Cornell Tech, and a researcher at Google Research, will be the second speaker this spring in the College of IST's Distinguished Lecture Series, presenting “Capturing and Rendering the World from Photos,” on March 25.
The top six Penn State student startup teams have been selected for the 2021 Inc.U Competition and will compete on WPSU’s Shark Tank-style TV show “The Investment” for a chance at a share of up to $30,000 in funding for their startup.
Ten years ago, the IST Diplomats student organization was founded to serve as ambassadors for the College of Information Sciences and Technology, to represent its academic programs, career solutions and student engagement opportunities. Several former and current IST Diplomats weigh in on their experience and how it has shaped their academic and professional careers.
For nearly two decades, computer scientists have been exploring how a limited number of nodes in a social network can be used to maximize information dissemination. Now, a team that includes a Penn State researcher has developed an AI system that can identify the people within a social network who can most effectively promote information about HIV prevention to their peers.
Twenty Penn State teams with students from seven different colleges and six campuses, including Penn State World Campus, will each be awarded $500 to compete in the Prototype Phase of the 2021 Nittany AI Challenge. Teams were selected based on their potential for positive impact on the world, all using AI for Good to develop solutions that address real-world challenges in education, environment, health and humanitarianism.
Bringing academic and research expertise in human-computer interaction design from Indiana University Bloomington, Jeffrey Bardzell joined the College of Information Sciences and Technology as associate dean for undergraduate and graduate studies last fall.
Eight information technology professionals representing various domains at Penn State recently came together to educate College of Information Sciences and Technology students about their professions during the college’s IT Career Panel.
John M. “Jack” Carroll, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology, is one of six recipients of the 2020/2021 Pioneer in Human-Computer Interaction Award of the International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction.
THON 2021 will be held primarily virtually for the first-time in its nearly 50-year history — making the committee that plans and manages technology for THON more essential than ever.
The Penn State Data Science Community will host a slate of speakers during the spring 2021 semester, each of whom will discuss the use of data science techniques to investigate a particular subject. Topics for the spring include social media use, additive manufacturing, the exploration of genetics, the role of big data in COVID-19 decision-making and more.
As a lifelong consumer of Apple products, College of Information Sciences and Technology student Logan Pratt also developed a dream of one day working for the company. Now, after completing a summer internship at Apple, he has been offered a full-time job as a software engineer upon graduation in May.
Undergraduate students interested in research surrounding the topic of machine learning in cybersecurity are invited to apply for the 2021 NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site Program, funded by the National Science Foundation.
Raymond J. Mooney, professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, will kick off the College of Information Sciences and Technology's Distinguished Lecture Series at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 25, on Zoom. He will present a talk on "Deep Learning for Automating Software Documentation Maintenance." The lecture is open to the Penn State community.
In an effort to combat malicious use of artificial intelligence text generators—for example, an adversary generating fake news to share on social media—researchers at the College of Information Sciences and Technology analyzed eight different state-of-the-art natural language generators to identify whether each had a distinct writing style that could be discovered by machine classifiers.
Attacks on vulnerable computer networks and cyber-infrastructure — often called zero-day attacks — can quickly overwhelm traditional defenses. A Penn State-led team of researchers has used a machine learning approach, based on a technique known as reinforcement learning, to create an adaptive cyber-defense against these attacks.
Asia Grant and Alejandro Cuevas began their friendship when they were members of Penn State’s Presidential Leadership Academy. After graduation, the two founded Redoux, a thriving scent and skincare company.
Helping users interact with information technology in a way that could potentially impact the world was the objective of a semester-long fall project in HCI: The User and Technology, a graduate level course in the College of Information Sciences and Technology.
What a person posts on Facebook could predict their risk for substance use, according to new research led by the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.
Last March, the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted university operations around the world. Students and instructors quickly transitioned to remote education, demonstrating reliance on new technologies that may have otherwise never been used.
A National Science Foundation grant will help lay the foundation for an interdisciplinary institute that encourages the use of artificial intelligence-enabled materials discovery, design and synthesis, according to a team of researchers.
For the second consecutive year, Penn State advanced to the international finals of the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition, the world’s largest offensive-based collegiate cybersecurity competition.
Chao-Hsien Chu, professor of information sciences and technology and one of the College of Information Sciences and Technology’s original five faculty members, died Friday, Jan. 15. He was 69.
Mary Beth Rosson, professor of information sciences and technology, has been named a 2020 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for her contributions to human-computer interaction, including scenario-based design.
A new algorithm developed by researchers at the College of Information Sciences and Technology could help leaders of governments and organizations make better informed decisions on how many symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals to test for COVID-19 with a limited supply of daily tests, and at what stage of the pandemic.
A team led by Penn State faculty and students, along with expert collaborators, has co-authored a guide that teaches the essential knowledge and skills to help interrupt the transmission of COVID-19 and other infections.