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.
If you have a story idea or questions about IST news, contact the Office of Marketing and Communications.
Assistant Professor Daniel Susser has been awarded the Haile Family Early Career Professorship in Information Sciences and Technology. The endowed position supports standout faculty members to foster a commitment to teaching, provide funds for emerging research, and offer recognition for their accomplishments.
Shaowen Bardzell, professor of information sciences and technology, has been elected as executive vice-president for the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI), the premier international society for all professionals, academics and students interested in human-computer interaction.
A $1.2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant will help researchers build a search engine and create other resources for scientists who need to scour billions of online documents to improve online privacy.
A research group from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology is well-represented at the virtual 10th International Conference on Communities and Technology, which began June 21. Five papers from the Center for Human-Computer Interaction were accepted to the conference, representing 20% of the papers program.
A Penn State team of researchers found that clickbait often did not perform any better and, in some cases, performed worse than traditional headlines. They also found that artificial intelligence systems designed to spot clickbait struggled with the task.
Penn State researchers, with funding from the Mental Research Institute, are developing a smartphone app to promote positive, engaged family relationships that support healthy development for adolescents.
Researchers from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology made a methodological contribution toward a potential answer to the challenging problem of how to operationalize posthuman concepts into practice for human-computer interaction through the art of noticing — specifically, observing birds to reimagine their relationship to the natural world as designers of technologies.
Chris Gamrat, instructional designer at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, is co-author on a chapter in the new book Microlearning in the Digital Age: The Design and Delivery of Learning in Snippet by Routledge.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, essential workers tweeted less often than general users about COVID-19 but more about overall mental health issues, according to researchers at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology. Additionally, essential workers’ overall tweets were more positive compared to general users, the researchers found.
Jiawei Han, Michael Aiken Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will present a talk as part of the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Lecture Series at 11:30 a.m. on June 14 via Zoom. In the talk, Han will discuss his work to explore the power of taxonomy and embedding in text mining.
As a child growing up in Nepal, Bikalpa Neupane never thought he would come to the U.S. for a college education, much less a graduate degree. Now, as a doctoral candidate in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, Neupane has developed an AI-driven platform that matches international students with mentors to help them through the college application process.
With a new grant from the National Institutes of Health, an interdisciplinary team of researchers aims to examine police radio communications to observe what happens during adverse encounters between police officers and male minority youth and study any patterns of interaction that may lead to unfortunate or tragic outcomes.
Penn State University Libraries presented its fourth annual Undergraduate Research Award: Excellence in Information Literacy honors to 100 students at nearly all undergraduate Penn State campuses. Awards recognized 96 current undergraduate students and recent graduates, four graduate students, plus two additional College of Medicine students and two collaborating faculty members participating in campus-wide virtual research exhibition events.
A new seminar series that aims to initiate a dialog between healthcare practitioners, clinical researchers, and artificial intelligence and data science experts on strategies for realizing the promise and potential of AI in healthcare starts June 8.
Penn State faculty members James Wang, professor of information sciences and technology, and Rui Zhang, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, each received a 2020 Amazon Research Award, which was announced publicly in April of this year.
Penn State alumna Jayme Anne Goldberg is the founder of Consequential Flowers, a social media network designed to help female students and young professionals develop impactful leadership skills.
Philip S. Yu, distinguished professor and the Wexler Chair in Information Technology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will kick off the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Lecture Series at 11 a.m. Thursday, May 27 on Zoom. Yu’s talk will focus on network heterogeneity on graph neural networks.
Penn State University Libraries and the Schreyer Honors College recognized the 10th annual finalist presentations and winner of the recently endowed Robert F. Guentter Jr. Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award on May 6, immediately following the three finalists’ remote presentations. Finalists represented the College of Agricultural Sciences, the College of Information Sciences and Technology, and the College of the Liberal Arts.
Cutting-edge agricultural technology has advanced in recent years, introducing innovations from self-driving tractors and laser scarecrows to robotic bees that aid in pollination. What could technologists learn from alternative agricultural movements, such as permaculture and eco farming, which seek to reimagine the relationships between humans, non-humans and land? Researchers at Penn State are finding out.
The College of Engineering has announced the winners of the spring Learning Factory Capstone Design Project Showcase, which took place virtually for the second year in a row. More than 700 students representing majors from the colleges of Engineering, Earth and Mineral Sciences, and Information Sciences and Technology participated.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a struggle for many students. But for Kareem Jelks, the pandemic has fueled his passion to help others, especially those in underserved communities. Jelks, who earned a degree in cybersecurity analytics and operations from the College of Information Sciences and Technology last week, has spent the past year creating software that helps minority populations with healthcare needs.
On May 13, the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence hosted "AI in a Post-COVID World," a virtual conference that will brought together experts from a variety of disciplines to discuss how artificial intelligence has aided in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data science can only be data science for good when it can be data science for all. That was the message of a recent symposium, “Harnessing the Data Revolution to Enhance Diversity,” which explored the issues of — and opportunities in — using data science to improve equity and diversity in academia and in society.
Social media has become a platform for new mothers to openly share their experiences of the joys and challenges of parenthood. Researchers at Penn State and Dalhousie University have unraveled the sentiments in nursing mothers’ tweets to better understand the factors influencing breastfeeding behaviors, which they hope can inform policies and improve resources for mothers.
Penn State researchers recently participated in the Consortium of Social Science Association’s annual Social Science Advocacy Day, meeting virtually with Congress and their staff during this annual event.
After a romantic breakup, there are often decisions to be made regarding the partners’ shared possessions, such as who takes the house and who gets the cat, and who keeps the friends. But when it comes to navigating a breakup in the digital age, a clean break isn’t necessarily as clear cut, according to Penn State alumnus Anthony Pinter.
2021 marks the 20th celebration of LGBTQ+ graduates during the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity’s Lavender Recognition ceremony.
When Porter Jenkins came to Penn State to pursue a doctorate in marketing, he never imagined he’d one day have a full-time career in academics, teaching and conducting research on data sciences and machine learning.
Penn State researchers have developed an Amazon Alexa skill to remotely deliver validated interventions to metastatic breast cancer patients in the comfort of their own homes. Named Nurse AMIE, which stands for Addressing Metastatic Individuals Everyday, the platform is aimed at providing supportive care interventions to supplement medical treatment and improve the quality of life for its users.
Penn State has launched an expanded initiative in Artificial Intelligence (AI), termed the AI Hub, which will bring together the University’s considerable resources and talent in AI to further advance its position as a global leader developing fundamental innovations in AI, in using AI and machine learning (ML) to solve the hardest challenges, and to create unique applications of AI and ML in unforeseen areas.
A new research center, the Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations and Scientific Applications, or CENSAI, will unite Penn State researchers to explore the use of artificial intelligence as a tool to dramatically accelerate the scientific process, an initiative that the center’s organizers say could rapidly accelerate scientific progress.
A newly founded, interdisciplinary research center established to further foundational and applied artificial intelligence in engineered systems will be housed in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Penn State College of Engineering.
Justin Silverman, who joined the College of Information Sciences and Technology last year as an assistant professor with a focus in biomedical statistics, made global headlines last summer for his study suggesting that 80% of U.S. COVID-19 cases went undetected in March 2020. Silverman recently talked to the college about his motivations and his research.
For College of Information Sciences and Technology student marshal Erin Flannery, Penn State gave her the opportunity to explore a number of diverse degree pathways and research activities. After exploring many topics of interest during her first year, she found that the programs within the College of IST would uniquely allow her to explore those interests through a multidisciplinary lens.
Have you recently turned to your mobile device or computer to find out if your cough, sniffle or fever could be caused by COVID-19? The online symptom checker you used may have advised you to stay home and call your medical provider if symptoms worsen, or perhaps told you that you may be eligible for COVID-19 testing. But why did it make the recommendation it did? And how should you know if you can trust it?
Like many college students across the country, Nick Alico saw his summer internship cut short last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. So he used his newfound time to address COVID-19 in a new light: as a data analytics intern for the Penn State Viral Imaginations: COVID-19 initiative — an online gallery and archive that showcases Pennsylvanians’ experiences during the pandemic.
Expanding on an established problem in mathematics and computer science known as fair cake-cutting — a metaphor for cutting a cake in a way that each participant receives a slice that they believes to be fair — Hadi Hosseini, assistant professor at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, and his team have introduced a novel concept of "multi-layered cake-cutting" to achieve fairness when distributing access time over multiple resources.
Bimal Balakrishnan, who spent seven years at the university as a master and doctoral degree student from 2001-08, credits the mentorship he received at the University for putting him on his life’s path. He is currently an associate professor and department chair in the Department of Architectural Studies, as well as the director of the Immersive Visualization Lab, at the University of Missouri.
Edward Frymoyer has received the Penn State Graduate School Alumni Society Lifetime Achievement Award. This award recognizes alumni who have achieved exceptional success throughout the course of their career and have demonstrated loyalty to the University and the Alumni Association.
When remote teaching and learning abruptly replaced traditional classroom instruction at the start of the pandemic, innovations and adaptations were introduced that could be considered to continue in post-pandemic education, according to experts from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.
For Angela Govila and Ankur Tarnacha, the College of Information Sciences and Technology is the foundation for everything they have. The two first met as students in 2003, and Tarnacha soon after asked Govila out for a cup of coffee. The rest, they say, is history.
The winning idea in the 2021 IdeaMakers Challenge, as part of Penn State Startup Week sponsored by PNC, was a digital subscription service to a database that helps dancers find hundreds of programs, schools and jobs to develop their skills. An interdisciplinary team of undergraduate students from the Smeal College of Business, the College of Information Sciences and Technology and the College of Engineering pitched the idea on March 24.
Screen time burnout? Many people are feeling it these days because of extended use of technology due to remote learning and remote working situations. But excessive screen time did not start with the COVID-19 pandemic, and one Nittany AI Challenge student team is virtually stepping into the user’s world to suggest a life-tech balance that is as easy as a walk in the park.
Penn State Startup Week powered by PNC culminated with a celebration of student entrepreneurs and innovators in technology, health, sustainability, the arts and global impact categories during the virtual student recognition reception on March 25.
To initiate productive conversations centered around policy and big tech, the Penn State Law, Policy, and Engineering initiative and the Penn State Science Policy Society student organization have collaborated to host a webinar, "Decoding Big Tech," on April 2.
The COVID-19 pandemic did not stop 644 students from around the world from participating in a virtual version of HackPSU. The 48-hour hackathon was held entirely online for 45 teams of students, some as close as University Park and others as far as West Bengal, India.
Shaowen Bardzell, professor of information sciences and technology, presented a keynote address on March 23 at the virtual New Materialist Informatics 2021 conference.
Bob and Susan Bardusch have made a gift to establish the Bardusch Family IdeaMakers Challenge Endowment at the College of Information Sciences and Technology. The endowment will support the IdeaMakers Challenge, an annual entrepreneurial pitch competition held annually as part of Penn State Startup Week powered by PNC and sponsored by IST.
In a new book, "Building Better Interfaces for Remote Autonomous Systems: An Introduction for Systems Engineers," authors from the College of Information Sciences and Technology present a broad review of important design frameworks and concepts of human-computer interaction so that systems engineers can make better decisions and better interfaces.
From Sunday morning news shows to on-air pregame commentary in sports, live telecasts draw viewers into real-time content on televisions around the world. But in these often-unscripted productions, what the audience sees is not always what the producer intends — especially in regard to equity of on-air time for subjects based on their race or gender.