The strength of the College of IST is demonstrated through the successes and accomplishments of its students, faculty, alumni, and programs. Read more about how the college and its people are driving innovative change and taking on the challenges of the Information Age.
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Meallergies, an app that can help avoid allergy attacks when ordering meals from restaurants, was the winning idea in the 2023 Bardusch Family IdeaMakers Challenge, held March 22 during Penn State Startup Week. The winning team received the top prize of $4,000 in the final pitch competition, which they’ll use to further explore and grow their idea.
Forty Penn State graduate students were named recipients of Penn State’s most prestigious annual graduate student awards, administered by the Graduate School in collaboration with several Penn State units. The awards recognize and celebrate graduate students who are excelling in teaching, research and service, as well as other academic pursuits.
As a full-time database consulting engineer, an independent financial adviser, and a commissioner in his local community, College of IST alumnus Fred Faylona relies on his Penn State experience to succeed professionally and make a difference in his community.
Fenglong Ma, assistant professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, is the recipient of a 2022 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation in recognition of his work, “Automated Multimodal Learning for Healthcare.”
Schreyer Honors College honored four Scholar alumni for their achievements and contributions with the 2023 Scholar Alumni Awards. The winners were recognized on March 24 at a luncheon held at the Hintz Family Alumni Center.
Student startup Bindr, a dating app that provides a safe space online for bisexual individuals, won $15,000, the largest prize amount, in the 2023 Invent Penn State Inc.U Competition. The competition, part of Penn State Startup Week powered by PNC, saw six Penn State student teams pitch their startups to a panel of judges and compete for up to $30,000 in funding.
Two artificial intelligence-driven models designed by researchers from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology could help promote the rights of low-income renters in the United States when facing forced eviction.
Penn State’s Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence is now offering social responsibility consultations to University researchers engaged in AI-related research.
In the next episode of "Conversations Live," WPSU will take a look at “sharenting” and the possible vulnerabilities and consequences of parents oversharing their children’s lives online.
The College of Information Sciences and Technology recently partnered with RMS US LLP to present the 2023 Be You in Tech Summit. The event brought together more than 60 Penn State students with corporate partners in a professional environment to connect, learn, and share ideas, while recognizing the strength and opportunity of diversity in the technology industry.
Each spring, Penn State Startup Week powered by PNC brings together the best and brightest Penn State student and alumni entrepreneurs and innovators for a weeklong celebration of what happens when Penn State’s inspired doers put their ideas into action.
The Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology recently announced eight projects that will receive funding from the college’s seed grant program. The program provides preliminary funding to support research activities and generate preliminary results that will eventually lead to bigger projects involving external funding. IST faculty wrote short proposals, which were reviewed by representatives of the college’s diverse faculty.
Penn State’s Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence is inviting short proposals for a special off-cycle round of "Big Idea Grant" seed funding earmarked for early concepts and research that has transformational potential. Applications will be accepted through May 1, with projects expected to start on July 1 and last for up to two years.
Technology thought leaders will share their vision for building smart, sustainable communities at the TechCon and Innovation Challenge at Penn State Abington on Saturday, March 25. The event is open to the public.
Nick Leghorn is using his Penn State degree in information sciences and technology to help The New York Times provide high-quality journalism while ensuring the digital experience can be tailored to the reader’s needs. As the news outlet’s director of application security, Leghorn is helping the company make a transformation from a company that focuses on print publications to one that offers online experiences.
Cybersecurity is a growing field full of career possibilities, and students at Penn State Wilkes-Barre are able to study the field firsthand thanks to an on-campus lab. The lab allows faculty at Penn State Wilkes-Barre to apply the principles they are teaching in lecture courses to real-world examples and scenarios.
As an IT business partner for Boeing, Megan Tucker is the focal point for one of the company’s new defense helicopter programs. She works between the program and the enterprise to ensure all IT requirements are met and communicated.
Language models, possibly including ChatGPT, paraphrase and reuse ideas from training data without citing the source, raising plagiarism concerns, according to a Penn State-led research team that conducted the first study to directly examine the phenomenon.
Teaching and Learning with Technology will offer a new virtual complement to the TLT Symposium this year. Symposium Lite is a half-day event on March 23, which will feature prerecorded presentations and live discussions.
Being a leader is both a goal and a mission that College of Information Sciences and Technology student Daniel Serfass has set out to accomplish. Now student body president for the World Campus Student Government and founder of Penn State World Campus for THON, Serfass is putting his strongest suit into practice.
In his role as director of cybersecurity technology protection for the Cleveland Clinic, Keith Duemling oversees all cybersecurity protection platforms for the clinic’s facilities throughout North America and Europe.
Faculty and staff in the College of Information Sciences and Technology were recognized at the college’s annual awards event this week. Recipients were nominated by their IST colleagues and selected by a review committee for their excellence in teaching, research and service.
Heather VanGorder, who earned a bachelor’s degree in information sciences and technology in 2020, currently works as an IT analyst at PepsiCo Inc. Her team is responsible for setting up the mapping that gets PepsiCo products to their final destinations.
A new AI-based tool developed by a team of researchers from Penn State and Jacaranda Health has been shown to improve health outcomes for new and expectant mothers in Kenya by providing better and more immediate access to maternal health care services.
As a lead software engineer at Disney Streaming, Ryan Hartzfeld is leading efforts to make impactful changes to a variety of streaming services offered by the Walt Disney Co.
A team of Penn State students recently placed third out of 169 universities in the U.S. Department of Energy’s annual CyberForce Competition. The team, which was comprised of members from the University’s Competitive Cyber Security Organization, also earned third place in last year’s event.
As manager of pricing strategy for Elevate Sports Ventures, Josh Stine is drawing on his industry experience to lead a pricing team serving more than 100 professional and collegiate partners.
Alexei Hooks, a fall 2022 graduate from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, was recently awarded the 2022-23 Westin Scholar Award for his outstanding skills and dedication to the field of privacy and data protection.
Students in the capstone course for the Human-Centered Design and Development program major are asking questions, finding solutions and using knowledge from previous classes to pursue a semester-long group project focused on creating user-centered technology.
The Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence recently announced the results of its third seed funding competition. The center awarded $145,000 to advance six interdisciplinary research projects that feature researchers from eight colleges and institutes.
The College of Information Sciences and Technology recently welcomed two new members to its Dean’s Advisory Board: Andy Duffett, senior vice president, Global Revenue Operations at CrowdStrike, and Corey Lee, enterprise security executive for U.S. Education at Microsoft Corporation.
Joel Gill Jr. has established himself in a tech consulting career and has learned from a variety of experiences and mentors. Now, with interests that span technology, business, music and cooking, he’s reflecting on his journey and sharing with current IST students the insights he’s gained — including the importance of team dynamics.
Adding random, short expressions of understanding in a conversation may turn smart speakers, such as Alexa and Siri, into robot therapists that allow people to open up more without violating their privacy, according to a team of researchers.
A new course offered by the College of Information Sciences and Technology is helping students prepare for their required internships by focusing on teamwork and real-world projects.
A new automated approach to detect doxing — a form of cyberbullying in which certain private or personally identifiable information is publicly shared without an individual's consent or knowledge — may help social media platforms better protect their users, according to researchers from Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology.
A new computational pipeline for analyzing three-dimensional imaging data can help biologists more accurately and quickly see how the cells in a plant’s leaves respond to the environment and identify plants that more efficiently use water, according to researchers.
Carly Mojica, from Colorado Springs, is the first-ever Penn State World Campus student to serve as student marshal for the College of Arts and Architecture's commencement ceremony.
Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology senior Djante McLaughlin is bringing his knowledge and passion for cybersecurity to life through his leadership with the IST Student Government and his work with the Department of Homeland Security.
As part of the “Perspective: Leaders at Penn State” video series, Andrew Sears, dean of the College of Information Sciences and Technology, shares his love for spending time with animals as an opportunity to reflect and gain perspective — and then reengage with his work in a more powerful way.
The Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology will honor Schreyer Honors Scholar Erica Mi as student marshal at its fall 2022 commencement, which will be held Saturday, Dec. 17.
A team of researchers at Penn State is aiming to speed up and streamline the collection of important environmental data that impacts the mushroom farming industry through a new digital solution.
A compilation of recent news, highlights, and achievements from the College of Information Sciences and Technology community.
Serving as a representative and advocate for her fellow Penn State students is a responsibility of which third-year College of Information Sciences and Technology student Nora O’Toole is extremely proud. As speaker of the assembly in the University Park Undergraduate Association, O’Toole oversees the legislative branch of Penn State’s student government and facilitates project execution for its five committees as they work to make the Penn State experience positive for every student.
This year's Military Appreciation Week celebrated faculty and staff that have served or are currently serving. These members of the Penn State community are an important part of what makes the University special. Three Penn Staters shared their stories about their time in the service and how their journey led them to where they are today.
Jason Streeter (class of 2007) and Amanda Brown (class of 2008) have been inspired by their individual Penn State experiences in their motivation to jointly support students at the University. The couple has made a commitment to establish the Jason Streeter and Amanda Brown Dean's Advisory Board Matching Scholarship in the College of Information Sciences and Technology.
For Sean Cicchiello, researching radical crimes in the U.S. and determining whether they are acts of terror is part of his job. Through an internship with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terror (START), where he is assisting with expanding the nation’s terrorism database, Cicchiello applies the skills and education he’s gained at Penn State while blending his interests in national security and political science.
Penn State hosted a delegation from the National Taipei University of Technology on Oct. 16-18. During the delegation’s visit, the delegation met with Penn State faculty and administrators, and President Neeli Bendapudi and Taipei Tech President Sea-Fue Wang signed two memoranda of understanding between the two universities.
Andy Landmesser, assistant teaching professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State Brandywine, was recently named the College of Information Sciences and Technology Statewide Faculty Member of the Year. He was presented with the award at the fall IST faculty meeting on Nov. 7.
Abdullah Konak, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State Berks, received the 2022 INFORMS Volunteer Service Award in October during the annual ceremony in Indianapolis.
Michelle Wiemer has had the opportunity to explore different lines of work and meet people from all walks of life through her journey as a military spouse. She recently discovered an industry that inspired her to make a career change, and decided to pursue a bachelor's degree in security and risk analysis through Penn State World Campus.