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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October 2025

October 3, 2025

Jaiden Johnson, a first-year software engineering student, debuted his voice-acting experience in Casino Casualty, a point-and-click Five Night’s at Freddy’s-inspired survival horror game. Johnson voices the character Red Rover, the hatchet-wielding robot appearing at the left of the pinball machine.
October 3, 2025

Cara Stievater, a fourth-year computer science student, presented “Find the Culprit: Query-Driven Tracing of Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities using Python's PyPi Dependencies" at ACM SIGKDD's 2025 Undergraduate Consortium. Stievater’s research focuses on tracking dependencies from Python’s common package manager PyPI, exposing indirect software vulnerabilities. The consortium is the premier international research conference for data mining.

September 2025

September 17, 2025

Igor Polotai, a fourth-year game design and development and history double major, published the study “The RIT Iceberg: A Case Study Documenting Collegiate Student Folklore and Traditions” in the Journal of Folklore and Education. The ongoing research covers the folklore, secrets, myths, and culture of RIT and the university’s student population and advocates for more scholarly research in the field of collegiate folklore.
September 12, 2025

Haibo Yang, assistant professor in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences Ph.D. program, received an award from the National Institutes of Health for his project, “Optimizing Nanobody Sequence Design through Multi-Objective Engineering.” Yang’s research centers around distributed/federated learning and optimizations algorithms.
September 10, 2025

Luke Whited, a first-year game design and development MS student, recently published REDSHIFT, a miniature game described as a first-person psychological horror short story. REDSHIFT has sold over 20,000 copies in its first two weeks, and it reached the top of the charts for “new and trending” games on Steam. The game was developed as part of Whited’s entrepreneurial co-op. He created his own indie games studio under the guidance of Sean Boyle, principal lecturer in the School of Interactive Games and Media, and collaborated with other RIT students in areas such as sound design and digital art.
September 10, 2025

Joe Geigel, professor in the Department of Computer Science, presented the talk “XRLive: A Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) Using Extended Reality in Live Performance to Motivate Interdisciplinary Education and Scholarship” at the SIGGRAPH 2025 Educator's Forum in Vancouver, British Columbia. The talk focused on the details of the XRLive VIP, which is part of the newly created VIP program at RIT.
September 5, 2025

Chao Peng, associate professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media, presented the game VR Lunar Roving Adventure at the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The annual conference brings together researchers, artists, developers, filmmakers, scientists, and business professionals with a shared interest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Pioneers in VR, as well as developers from companies like NVIDIA and Meta, explored the team's VR game during the conference.
September 5, 2025

Andy Meneely, associate professor in the Department of Software Engineering, recently published an opinion piece in Communications of the ACM titled "Stop Using Vulnerability Counts to Measure Software Security." The piece touches upon the importance of nuanced measurement in an age where data, measurement, and human society intersect.

August 2025

August 29, 2025

Kristen Shinohara, associate professor in the School of Information, received an award from the National Science Foundation for her research project "Bridging the Accessibility Skills Gap: Connecting Industry and Computing Faculty for the Adoption of Evidence-Based Teaching of Accessibility."
August 18, 2025

Hanif Rahbari, assistant professor of cybersecurity, was recently invited to present at the IEEE Silicon Valley Cybersecurity Conference 2025 where he discussed his research in post-quantum cryptography. He was joined by other speakers from Google, NIST, and Juniper Networks.