Newsmakers | Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences

Highlighting the professional and academic accomplishments of College of Computing and Information Sciences students, faculty, and staff.

Newsmakers are a quick and easy way to acknowledge the professional and academic accomplishments of RIT students, faculty, and staff, such as publishing an article in a scholarly journal, presenting research at a conference, serving on a panel discussion, earning a scholarship, or winning an award. Newsmakers appear in News and Events as well as the "In the News" section on faculty/staff directory profile pages.

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February 2026

February 12, 2026

Yiqin Zhao, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media, received a grant from Nvidia for his research project "AI-Driven Interactive Imaging for Low-Cost and Accurate Material Understanding" in December 2025. His research will bring new low-cost solutions for material understanding in engineering, manufacturing, and construction.
February 6, 2026

The AT&T ROC Jr. Game Dev Camp Powered by RIT received the Champions of Change award Feb. 19 from the New York State School Boards Association. The recognition highlights programs that bring positive, meaningful change to the students, communities, and districts of New York. With the award, a new banner will hang in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences.

January 2026

January 30, 2026

Rajendra K. Raj, professor in the Department of Computer Science, attended a steering committee meeting of the joint task force of the IEEE Digital Privacy Initiative, IEEE Computer Society, Association of Computing Machinery, and the International Federation of Information Processing in Frankfurt, Germany, in December. The task force is developing interdisciplinary and globally relevant graduate-level privacy curricular guidelines.
January 23, 2026

Christopher Schwartz, research scientist in the Department of Cybersecurity; Jessica Bayliss, professor; David Schwartz, director; and Brian Tomaszewski, professor, all in the School of Interactive Games and Media, and A. David Abitbol (Army Transformation and Training Command), published “Access Denied and Sector Down: Introducing Resilience Games for Critical Infrastructure Preparedness” in The Cyber Defense Review, Vol 10, No. 2. The Army Cyber Institute distributes issues throughout the federal government, military, and industry.
January 23, 2026

Professor Emeritus Paul Tymann, in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, has been recognized with the 2026 SIGCSE Award for Distinguished Service to the Computer Science Education Community. Tymann will be recognized at the 2026 SIGCSE Technical Symposium in St. Louis.

December 2025

December 10, 2025

Owen Gottlieb, associate professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media, chaired a paper panel on learning media archival gems with colleagues from UCLA, University of Georgia, and the Smithsonian at the Association of Moving Image Archivists 2025 conference on Dec. 4 in Baltimore. His paper was on his recovery and preservation of a lost literacy media work by John Robbins. A branch of Gottlieb’s research at the Interaction, Media, and Learning Lab focuses on the history and preservation of instructional design media and its implications for contemporary games and interactive media for learning.
December 8, 2025

Christopher Schwartz, research scientist in the Department of Cybersecurity, and Matthew Wright, O’Sullivan Professor and chair of the Department of Cybersecurity, along with Andrea Hickerson, former director of RIT's School of Communication and current dean of the School of Journalism and New Media at University of Mississippi, published the book Fake-Checking: A Journalist’s Guide to Deepfakes. It serves as a practical reference for journalists and advanced media students who are increasingly required to identify and verify potential deepfakes and their future iterations. The guide aims to assist journalists in understanding the complexities of deepfakes from several angles, including philosophical, historical, technical, and methodological.
December 8, 2025

Jonathan Weissman, principal lecturer in the Department of Cybersecurity, wrote the Ninth Edition of the CompTIA Network+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide. The book prepares candidates for the new Network+ exam with learning objectives, exam tips, practice exam questions, and in-depth explanations of concepts, including network connectivity, configuration, monitoring, troubleshooting, security, and more.
December 5, 2025

Dipkamal Bhusal, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, presented four pieces of work at the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation Conference on Dec. 4 in San Diego. Showcasing his research in explainability, interpretability, and their applications in reliable AI is a novel framework for FACE (Faithful Automatic Concept Extraction), which uncovers the specific, trustworthy concepts that an AI model is using to make its final decision. This research is a crucial step forward in making sophisticated AI applications more transparent, trustworthy, and ready for real-world deployment.
December 3, 2025

Sanjay Charitesh Makam, a fourth-year computing and information technologies major, and Naresh Kshetri, lecturer in the Department of Cybersecurity, presented their secRNNlong project at the 26th annual ACM Conference on Cybersecurity and Information Technology Education on Nov. 7 in Sacramento, Calif. The project presents and proposes a robust and adaptive framework for effective malware detection via Recurrent Neural Networks with Long Short-Term Memory and Transformers for Improved Cybersecurity.