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 2026

May 18, 2026

Garreth Tigwell, assistant professor in the School of Information, has been honored as a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery in recognition of his technical and professional achievements and contributions in computer science and information technology over the last 10 years.
May 1, 2026

Gaurank Maheshwari, a data science graduate student, presented “NewsLensAI: NER-Guided Summarization for Mitigating Hallucination and Bias in LLM-Based News Summaries” at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Singapore. Maheshwari’s research was completed under the guidance of Ashique KhudaBukhsh, assistant professor of software engineering, as part of graduate capstone research focused on reducing hallucinations and bias in AI-generated news summaries

April 2026

April 27, 2026

Muhammad Raees, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, presented their research at the CHI conference, April 13-17 in Barcelona. Assistant Professor Konstantinos Papangelis’ lab group contributed a total of nine publications to the conference, and their paper, “Evaluating How People Appropriately Rely on AI,” was honored with a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award.
April 24, 2026

Owen Gottlieb, associate professor of interactive games and media, had his book chapter on instructional design archival history, “Heritage in Search of a Home,” featured in the 2026 LABF Broadcast Historian Award-winning book The Archivability of Television. Co-editor Lauren Bratslavsky writes “… it’s Owen’s chapter that I find to be among the core conceptual and methodological anchors to the scholarly foundation of the overall project…with key implications for contemporary interactive media and games for learning...The book would not be as strong—and award-winning—without this chapter.” The book award was presented at BEA's annual convention on April 17 in Las Vegas.
April 24, 2026

Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences’ Accessible Learning Labs team presented research and led a live demonstration at the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Northeast Region conference at Smith College on April 10 in Northampton, Mass.
April 24, 2026

David Schwartz, director of the School of Interactive Games and Media, presented on Jack Voltaic at the Space Command Academic Engagement Enterprise Symposium on April 17.
April 20, 2026

Owen Gottlieb, associate professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media, presented “Where Hope Takes Root, and Hearts Are Tested” (Inside/Out: “Just One Place” 1973) at the highly selective Orphan Film Symposium, April 9, at The Ohio State University. Gottlieb presented a recovered instructional learning design with implications for interactive media in the classroom today.

The biannual international conference and festival of scholars, researchers, archivists, and artists accepted only 42 programs in 2026. He worked in concert with the Indiana University Moving Image Archives and the National Archive of Public Broadcasting at the University of Maryland. One branch of Gottlieb’s Interaction, Media, and Learning Lab centers on the History of Instructional Media Design.
April 13, 2026

Ye Zheng, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, along with Assistant Professor Yidan Hu and Professor Sumita Mishra from the Department of Cybersecurity, received top honors at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. Their 2026 paper, “Quantifying Classifier Utility under Local Differential Privacy,” was honored with the Best Student Paper Award. The group also received the Best Artifact Runner-Up Award, recognizing code or data associated with a research paper, for their 2025 work “Optimal Piecewise-based Mechanism for Collecting Bounded Numerical Data under Local Differential Privacy.”
April 13, 2026

Akira Takeuchi, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, won the 31st Outstanding Student Presentation Award at the 154th Acoustical Society of Japan Autumn Meeting 2025 in Sendai, Japan. He presented a paper titled “The Role of Self-Construal in Auditory Spatial Attention: Neural Responses to Masking Noise in Speech-in-Noise Tasks,” which focused on the relationship between listeners’ auditory spatial attention and their cultural background.
April 8, 2026

August Barrus, a first-year computer science student, was selected as the winner of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Women’s History Month Poster Contest. Barrus was recognized for this achievement at the department’s symposium on March 28.