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 2022

February 17, 2022

Carlos Castellanos, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media, has been awarded a residency at the Institute for Plant Molecular and Cell Biology in Valencia, Spain, to work on genetically modifying the stress response genes of agricultural plants so that they trigger morphological changes as the plants grow under stressful environmental conditions (like those expected from future climates). Using multi/hyper-spectral imaging and machine learning, the team will predict the emergence of these changes and translate them to text and sound to give the impression that the plants are “speaking” or “singing” to us.
February 15, 2022

David Schwartz, director, and Brian Tomaszewski, associate professor, both in the School of Interactive Games and Media, have received $30,000 from the Army Cyber Institute at West Point to prototype a resilience game to instruct critical infrastructure leaders about cyber security threats and impacts. The project is part of RIT’s Army Apprenticeship program and Global Cybersecurity Institute, and it continues the collaboration from RIT’s MAGIC Center and Center for Geographic Science & Technology.
February 3, 2022

Rajendra Raj, professor of computer science, was awarded Fellow of the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) for his leadership in establishing cybersecurity and data science program accreditation. CSAB is an ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) member governed by the world’s three largest societies in computing and statistics: ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), ASA (American Statistical Association), and IEEE-Computer Society.

December 2021

December 6, 2021

Jonathan Weissman, senior lecturer of computing security, was inducted into the 2021 New Internet IPv6 Hall of Fame as an IPv6 Evangelist. The recognition was created by the IPv6 Forum to celebrate experts and evangelists of IPv6 who have made extraordinary contributions to the design and large-scale deployment of IPv6 around the world. Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the internet.

November 2021

November 18, 2021

Hanif Rahbari, assistant professor of computing security, received a U.S. patent on a novel “Method for exploiting preamble waveforms to support device and network functionalities in wireless systems.” Rahbari and Marwan Krunz, a researcher at University of Arizona, developed the communication and signal processing technique for single and multiple-antenna systems. They tested and evaluated it on software-defined radios, and are now developing novel security and non-security applications of the technique.
November 15, 2021

David Schwartz, director of the School of Interactive Games and Media, was guest editor with Alenka Poplin of Iowa State University of a special issue of Gaming and Geospatial Information, which features several peer-reviewed articles in the area of geogames/location-based games.

September 2021

September 15, 2021

Olivia Gallucci, a second-year computing security and computer science student, presented on “The Effectiveness of Threat Mitigation in Layers of the Open Systems Interconnection Model,” at the 2021 Women in Cybersecurity International Conference Sept. 8 in Denver. Her research was created under Sylvia Perez-Hardy, associate professor of networking and systems administration. Gallucci also published three articles in the September edition of Cyber Defense Magazine about the international Black Hat conference in Las Vegas: “Gold Optis: Most Innovative and Socially Conscious Technologies at Black Hat”; “Silver Optis: Innovative and Socially Conscious Technologies at Black Hat”; and “Bronze Optis: Innovative Technologies at Black Hat.”

August 2021

August 31, 2021

Jonathan Weissman, senior lecturer of computing security, authored Principles of Computer Security: CompTIA Security+ and Beyond Lab Manual (Exam SY0-601). The hands-on guide contains more than 90 lessons and labs that help readers master key cybersecurity concepts, preparing them for the widely recognized CompTIA Security+ certification exam. Find the book on Amazon.
August 23, 2021

Farhad Akhbardeh, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, published a paper at the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 main conference on “Handling Extreme Class Imbalance in Technical Logbook Datasets,” together with Associate Professor Cecilia Alm, Assistant Professor Marcos Zampieri, and Associate Professor Travis Desell, who are affiliated with the computing and information sciences Ph.D. program.
August 23, 2021

Eman Abdullah Alomar ’18 MS (software engineering), a computing and information sciences Ph.D. candidate, and Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, assistant professor in the Department of Software Engineering, presented “Can refactoring be self-affirmed? A study on how developers document refactoring activities” at IWOR@International Conference on Software Engineering on May 28. The team received the Best Paper and Best Presentation Awards.