Research news, awards, publications and more from the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at RIT.

"DeFake" project awarded more than $2 million for work thwarting
deepfake technology 

Endowed Professor and Chair of Cybersecurity Matthew Wright is leading a team of RIT student and faculty researchers helping journalists and intelligence analysts figure out what is real and what is fake. Learn more. 

RIT software engineering professor awarded more than $1.7 million from NSF to empower inclusive software education and foster STEM proficiency

PI Daniel Krutz, in collaboration with RIT colleagues and students, launched Accessible Learning Labs (ALL), a research effort aimed at promoting inclusive software development. Labs include a range of topics such as designing for sound, speech, and visual accessibility, as well as modules on "Ethics of AI," neural networks and machine learning. Explore ALL Labs. 

RIT computer science professor proposes new way to make artificial intelligence smarter and greener

By mimicking how neurons in the brain learn, Alexander Ororbia is working to make artificial intelligence (AI) more powerful and energy efficient. His research article, “Contrastive signal–dependent plasticity: Self-supervised learning in spiking neural circuits, was recently published in the journal Science Advances.

RIT professor Tae Oh helping drive US-Korea partnerships as President of Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association (KSEA)

Professor (and KSEA President) Tae Oh led the proceedings of the 37th US-Korea Conference on Science, Technology, and Entrepreneurship in August. This year's conference, themed "The Next Era of Science, Technology, and Entrepreneurship with Artificial Intelligence," showcased groundbreaking research, fostered international collaborations, and highlighted the pivotal role of AI in shaping the future. View Conference Recap video.

Welcome Dr. Dukka KC as new Chair of Computer Science!

Dr. Dukka KC joins us from Michigan Technological University where he previously served as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Computing and a Professor of Computer Science. He also served as the Associate Director of the Institute for Computing and Cybersystems.

Dr. KC has successfully secured over $11 million in research funding from NSF, NIH, DoD, and other agencies, serving as both a Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-PI.

Welcome Dr. Sharon Mason as new Director of the School of Information!

Dr. Sharon Mason has been a member of the College of Computing faculty since 1997, providing curricular leadership in the area of networking and systems administration. Her research has focused on student and faculty success, including among marginalized groups within STEM fields. Sharon's contributions include securing over $5 million in funding as a Principal Investigator or co-Principal Investigator. She served as PI on an NSF grant targeting growth mindset strategies for low-income students and as Co-PI on an NSF ADVANCE grant to increase the representation and advancement of women faculty across RIT.

Welcome Dr. Daqing Hou as new Chair of Software Engineering!

Dr. Daqing Hou joins us from Clarkson University where he was Professor and Director of Software Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his doctoral degree in Computing Science from University of Alberta, Canada. His research interests include software engineering, cybersecurity/ behavioral biometrics, and software engineering education, and he has published approximately 100 peer-reviewed research papers on these topics. 

Welcome Dr. Naveen Sharma in his new role as the college’s first Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Industry Engagement!

Dr. Naveen Sharma's new role will enable our college to accelerate connections with industry to create new opportunities for students, spark additional faculty-industry collaborations, enhance industry engagement for senior projects and capstones, and coordinate the multi-faceted nature of successful relationships between our college and external partners.Dr. Sharma was formerly Chair of Software Engineering.

Welcome Billy Brumley as new Director of Research at RIT's ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute and Kevin O’Sullivan Endowed Professor in Cybersecurity!

Dr. Billy Brumley joins us from Tampere University in Finland where he spent a decade as a professor and was recognized as a 2018 European Research Council Starting Grant Laureate. Brumley is a specialist in system security, cryptography engineering, and side-channel analysis, who also brings industry experience as a staff engineer for Qualcomm’s Product Security Initiative in San Diego.

Researchers from our college presented a cutting-edge defense mechanism against advanced wireless attacks at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM). The paper, authored by Professor Hanif Rahbari and computing and information sciences Ph.D. student Naureen Hoque, was showcased at the top-ranked networking conference held in Vancouver in May. Learn more. 

1st-year Ph.D. student Raman Zatsarenko won Best Presenter Award at the 5th Annual IEEE World Artificial Intelligence in Internet of Things (AI IoT) Congress and presented two papers.

He was recognized for presenting the paper: "Trust-Based Anomaly Detection in Federated Edge Learning'' in the Proceedings of the 2024 5th Annual IEEE World AI IoT Congress (AIIoT), in Seattle in May.

Computing and information sciences Ph.D. student Viet Nguyen won the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Eye-Tracking Research & Applications (ACM ETRA) in Glasgow in June.

Professor Leon Reznik also presented two papers along with students from our college at the 19th Annual Symposium on Information Assurance (ASIA’24). Pictured at left: Raman Zatsarenko (1st year PhD student in computing and information sciences), Sergei Chuprov (3rd year PhD student in computing and information sciences), Harshil Patel (2nd year MS student in computer science) and Dmitrii Korobeinikov (1st year MS student in software engineering).

Jake Adams, a lecturer in RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media, created the first ever digital holographic comic.

Adams mixes his backgrounds in fine arts and interactive media to create his holocomics. Using a specialized Lightfield holographic display from the company Looking Glass, the comic books become 3D holograms with sound, animation, and interactivity.

RIT computing and information sciences Ph.D. student Sujan Dutta enjoys creating educational videos about machine learning and data science on his Normalized Nerd YouTube channel. His explainers are geared to those with some computer science background. Over the past five years, Dutta’s channel has amassed more than 100,000 subscribers. His most popular video—about Markov Chains Clearly Explained—has 1.2 million views.

Justin Pelletier and Ted Selker collaborated on a cover story for ACM Interactions: Making Voting Easier for Disabled and Overseas Voters: Secure, Accessible Virtual Voting Infrastructure.

Their piece can be found in the August 28, 2024 edition of the magazine.

Billy Brumley and a multidisciplinary group of researchers from around the globe are investigating the availability of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, in order to better understand and combat its widespread dissemination.

Their study, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, offers a comprehensive analysis of the availability, search behavior, and user demographics related to CSAM on the Tor network. The team also intercepted CSAM users directly with a survey, discovering new ways to interfere with users’ activities.

Elon Musk’s Criticism of ‘Woke AI’ Suggests ChatGPT Could Be a Trump Administration Target, WIRED

"The issue may become worse as AI systems become more pervasive," says Ashique KhudaBukhsh, a computer scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology who developed a tool called the Toxicity Rabbit Hole Framework, which teases out the different societal biases of large language models. “We fear that a vicious cycle is about to start as new generations of LLMs will increasingly be trained on data contaminated by AI-generated content,” he says.

Professors publish first-of-its-kind security data repository

Professors Bruce Hartpence, Daryl Johnson and Bill Stackpole, of the iSchool and Department of Cybersecurity, and Professor Andres Kwasinski of the Department of Computer Engineering, published a new paper on network and security datasets as part of the 2024 International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications, in Washington, D.C. 

The new collections can be found here:
https://repository.rit.edu/data/1/

https://repository.rit.edu/data/2/

And additional security datasets can be found on our ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute website.

Amazon executive supports new path for cybersecurity students

Arthur Deane ’08 (electrical engineering) is paving the way for a more diverse and inclusive tech industry.

Deane currently works in Washington, D.C., leading the security organization at Amazon Health Services. On the same week that he started that role, he also established an endowed scholarship fund to support African American, Latin American, and Native American students enrolled in cybersecurity at RIT.

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