Computing and Information Sciences News

Explore, discover, and get involved were some of the suggestions the newest RIT students received during Thursday’s New Student Convocation, which included welcomes from administrators, their new Student Government president, and even some levity featuring RIT President David Munson who pretended he needed to finish his college education.

RIT students participated in this summer’s Studio930 design consultancy, an interdisciplinary studio that focuses on the development of assistive healthcare solutions by leveraging the use of technology, art, and design. The 10-week long summer experience concluded with a student exhibition inside RIT’s LiveAbility Lab, a close partnership between RIT and the Al Sigl Community of Agencies. 

Rochester Business Journal reports on Wayfair's gift of roughly $850,000 in server equipment to RIT’s Computer Science House. The donation was facilitated by RIT alum Fred Oettinger, who works at the company.  

A team of faculty and student researchers at RIT are helping create a more accessibility-literate and empathetic software engineering workforce. The researchers, led by Daniel Krutz, assistant professor of software engineering, are developing free online lessons on how to create software that is accessible for those with visual, cognitive, hearing, dexterity, and other disabilities.

When RIT’s Computer Science House put out a call for hardware donations last year, Fred Oettinger—an alumnus and staff engineer at Wayfair—got an idea. He knew that Wayfair had just what they needed. Wayfair, one the world’s largest destinations for the home, has gifted RIT’s Computer Science House (CSH) about $850,000 in server equipment.

A hospitality workforce training program run by Saunders College of Business is responding both to the needs of underserved immigrants and refugees seeking meaningful work and an industry that has been devastated by staff shortages wrought by the pandemic.

RIT will establish two new endowed professorships in the College of Science thanks to a $2 million donation from Jeffrey Harris ’75 and his partner, Joyce Pratt. RIT matched their donation with $4 million in funding as part of a $20 million challenge to encourage alumni, parents, and friends of the university to support faculty recruitment, retention, and research critical to RIT’s priorities and trajectory.

RIT will begin offering two new Ph.D. programs beginning in the fall of 2023: business administration and cognitive science. Today, RIT enrolls 300 students in 11 Ph.D. programs.

Kamal Rana, an imaging science Ph.D. student from India, has been using his skills to help identify landslide triggers and develop models for forecasting landslides.

Dean Sophia Maggelakis will be leaving RIT to become the senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at Wentworth Institute of Technology. Maggelakis joined RIT as an assistant professor in 1990, became head of the School of Mathematical Sciences in 2001, and became dean of the College of Science in 2010.

RIT has launched a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in new media design at its RIT Croatia Zagreb campus. Enrollment is currently underway and the first cohort of students will begin its studies in the multidisciplinary degree program this fall.

Libraries and museums across the country have begun recapturing lost and obscured text on historically significant documents thanks to low-cost spectral imaging systems developed by faculty and students at RIT.