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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May 2025

May 5, 2025

Emery Rios, a fourth-year cybersecurity student, has been selected as the recipient of the Norman A. Miles Award for Academic Excellence in Study for the 2025-2026 academic year. The award is given to a student who began their studies as a first-year student at RIT and is entering their last year of undergraduate study with the highest GPA across the university. As part of the award, Rios selected Yin Pan, professor in the Department of Cybersecurity, to receive the 2025-2026 Norman A. Miles Award for Academic Excellence in Teaching.
May 1, 2025

Naresh Kshetri, lecturer in the Department of Cybersecurity, has been elevated to Senior Member of IEEE, an honor bestowed to those who have made significant contributions to the profession.

April 2025

April 16, 2025

RIT hosted the Industry Consortium for AI Research and Translation Workshop April 3-4, bringing together industry and academic leaders to explore cutting-edge AI research and innovation. The event, co-organized by Shal Khazanchi, associate dean for Research and Graduate Programs in Saunders College of Business, and Naveen Sharma, associate dean for Faculty Affairs and Industry Engagement in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, explored collaborative strategies for an RIT-industry consortium to drive future AI advancement.
April 16, 2025

Richard Zanibbi, professor in the Department of Computer Science, presented at the AI + Theoretical Physics Symposium at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. The symposium brought together leading physicists, including 2024 Nobel Prize winner in physics Geoffrey Hinton, Anthropic AI Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan, and Stephen Wolfram. Zanibbi participated in a panel discussion about processing the data of theoretical physics and discussed recent work in RIT’s Document and Pattern Recognition Lab, where he explores effective and usable tools for searching text and graphics in research papers and technical documents.
April 16, 2025

Nidhi Rastogi, assistant professor in the Department of Software Engineering, recently published “CTIBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Cyber Threat Intelligence” with computing and information sciences Ph.D. student Md Tanvirul Alam, computer science Ph.D. student Dipkamal Bhusal, and Le Nguyen ’24 (data science). The established benchmark was used by the Google Security Blog to evaluate Google's latest LLM security model, with Google describing their work as a leading threat intelligence benchmark.
April 16, 2025

Jessica Ancillotti, a computer science master’s student in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, presented “Determining SPHINCS+ Readiness for Standardization of SLH-DSA Signature” at the Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) Conference on April 2 in Dallas. Her research focuses on evaluating the performance and adoption potential of SPHINCS+, a post-quantum digital signature scheme recently standardized by NIST.
April 11, 2025

Igor Polotai, a third-year game design and development and history double major, was named to the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge's 2025 Student Voting Honor Roll. Polotai is one of only 232 students nationwide to receive this distinction and was recognized as a Voter Engagement Leadership Scholar with RIT’s Center for Leadership & Civic Engagement. The distinction highlights college student leaders for committing to nonpartisan democratic engagement and contributions to their local communities.

March 2025

March 31, 2025

Naresh Kshetri, lecturer in the Department of Cybersecurity, co-edited the book Blockchain Technology for Cyber Defense, Cybersecurity, and Countermeasures: Techniques, Solutions, and Applications. The book features 15 chapters exploring advanced cybersecurity concepts utilizing blockchain technology.
March 26, 2025

Qi Yu, professor in the School of Information, received a new award from the Department of Defense for his project, Dynamic Scene Graphs for Extracting Activity-Based Intelligence. The project will develop a dynamic learning framework to extract Activity-Based Intelligence in complex military operations.
March 26, 2025

Michael Jackson, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Microelectronic Engineering, hosted a half-day short course on cleanroom basics for seven employees of Optimax on March 13.