News
Computing and Information Sciences Ph.D.

After going virtual for 2021, the Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival is back in person and virtually, planned from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 23, on the RIT campus in Henrietta and online at the Imagine RIT website.

From robot waiters to river otters, RIT’s Graduate Showcase will cover a wide variety of topics representing graduate scholarship from the university’s Henrietta and global campuses. The symposium, held April 7, will feature oral presentations in the morning and poster presentations, demonstrations, and visual exhibitions in the afternoon.

Computing researchers at RIT are teaming up with Sappi, the leading global provider of sustainable woodfibre products and bio-based solutions, to improve innovation processes. Sappi is funding research to establish the Sappi–RIT Digital Innovation Lab in RIT’s Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. 

RIT’s world-class home for cybersecurity has a new name. On March 8, RIT and ESL Federal Credit Union jointly announced an exclusive naming rights partnership for the ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute at RIT.

RIT’s strategic plan calls for adding six to 12 new Ph.D. programs and conferring 50 doctoral degrees every year by 2025. The university already reached the latter goal with 51 Ph.D. degrees conferred in the 2020-2021 academic year.

Three faculty members who chose to start their research careers at RIT received prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Awards in 2021. Their research aims to advance the foundations of machine intelligence, artificial intelligence, and clean energy.

NASA’s Artemis program plans to return humans to the moon by 2025. However, in a new game developed by RIT faculty and students, people can use virtual reality to return even sooner.

New machine learning techniques developed by scientists at Rochester Institute of Technology are revealing important information about how pulsars—rapidly rotating neutron stars—behave. In a new study published by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the researchers outlined their new techniques and how they applied to study Vela, the brightest radio pulsar in the sky.

RIT alumnus and founder of Datto Austin McChord is creating four endowment awards to support RIT students and professors. In naming the awards, McChord is honoring his grade school teachers from his hometown school district in Newtown, Conn. The endowments are made possible as part of a $50 million donation that McChord made to RIT in 2017.

Rui Li, an assistant professor in RIT’s Ph.D. program in computing and information sciences, received a NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award and grant to develop machine intelligence that can actually grow when given new information.

More than 50 students are expected to earn their Ph.D. degrees by the end of June. The hooding ceremony, which will also include Ph.D. recipients in the class of 2020, is May 15.

Undergraduates aren’t the only students taking advantage of RIT’s co-op and internship program. Across the university, Ph.D. students are securing prestigious work experiences to provide important gateways to careers in industry, foundations, and government.