Newsmakers

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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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.

  • December 3, 2025

    W. Michelle Harris, associate professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media, will have the opening reception for her new work, Nia Panes, at Rochester Contemporary Art Center on Dec. 5. Showcasing the intersection of technical skill and profound social commentary, Nia Panes reimagines memorial stained glass to honor Anna Murray Douglass, Hester Jeffrey, and Austin Steward, celebrating their enduring legacies in abolition, suffrage, and community organizing.

November 2025

  • November 21, 2025

    Billy Brumley, Kevin O’Sullivan Endowed Professor in Cybersecurity, presented “Constant-Time BIGNUM Is Bollocks” at the OpenSSL Conference 2025, Oct. 9, in Prague. Brumley discussed the challenges of designing and implementing a truly constant-time arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic software library, why the cryptographer’s mantra “just make it constant time” is a pipe dream, and radical alternative approaches. It was noted as the second most popular talk at the conference.

  • November 12, 2025

    Reynold Bailey, professor in the Department of Computer Science, delivered a public lecture at the University of the West Indies, Five Islands Campus in Antigua. His talk, “Back to the Brain: Rethinking Fundamental AI Research and Building Research Capacity in the Caribbean,” highlighted his work in human-centered computing and eye-tracking research and explored how brain-inspired approaches can inform artificial intelligence. He also discussed strategies for advancing research capacity and building research collaborations in the Caribbean region.