New Jersey Institute of Technology has named Jamie Payton, professor and chair of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Temple University, to lead its Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC) as dean beginning July 1, 2024. YWCC is presently the largest college at NJIT and is a key element of NJIT's drive to become a nexus of innovation under its new strategic plan. Its three departments, Computer Science, Data Science, and Informatics, prepare students to enter burgeoning fields that also are research priorities of NJIT, such as software engineering, cybersecurity, information…

Speaker after speaker reinforced what Kevin Belfield, dean of the College of Science and Liberal Arts at New Jersey Institute of Technology, said about the university’s Math Success Initiative: “It takes a village to put a program like this together.” The speakers were at a campus ceremony celebrating the first students to experience MSI and graduate from NJIT: Okyere Boateng, Brian Herrera-Calle, Catherine Ochoa and Steff Pitti. The students exemplify the best of Newark, as each attended high school in the city before enrolling at NJIT. So, that’s why City of Newark Chief Education Officer…

For two decades, the Ying Wu College of Computing Capstone Program has been an instrumental part of NJIT’s academic experience. The program places students in real-world assignments with leading companies, government organizations and community stakeholders to produce creative, multidisciplinary-driven solutions. A capstone project is a graduation requirement for all seniors with options to work on sponsor company or organization assigned proposals, choose the CISCO entrepreneurship track (using CISCO based platforms) for solving problems in network and information security, or create their…

New Jersey Institute of Technology has a new Extended Reality (XR) Laboratory on campus, where students and faculty can learn to use augmented- and virtual-reality as a learning and teaching tool. The lab is now open in Guttenberg Information Technologies Center, room 1402, across from the NJIT makerspace. It’s operated by the digital learning office and complements Ying Wu College of Computing’s MIXR Lab, where researchers study XR itself, on the third floor of the same building. “The goal is to create not just a lab, but also to keep in mind how can we support integrating XR into teaching…

An all-freshman team, Rackify, was the top NJIT winner and third overall at this year’s MakeNJIT hardware hackathon, creating a smart bicycle rack that automatically locks your ride by activating an RFID reader and extending an arm through the spokes or frame. Rackify members Raghav Bharath, Prabhav Sharma and Tanush Tammanagoudar (electrical and computer engineering), Burhan Naveed (computer science) and Matthew Levine (mechanical engineering) came up with the idea in response to MakeNJIT’s themes of smart- and urban infrastructure. The device could be retrofitted to traditional bike racks…

Accomplished computer science and engineering professors at New Jersey Institute of Technology were among the featured speakers at a conference about creating “smart” cities that was organized by two centers of NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management: the Leir Research Institute and Hub for Creative Placemaking. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Guiling “Grace” Wang talked about her research into developing responsive traffic signals whose timing adjusts based on the volume of traffic. Artificial intelligence is central to that project. In addition, Wang, who’s also associate…

Application data requirements vs. available network bandwidth has been the ongoing Battle of the Information Age, but now it appears that a truce is within reach, based on new research from NJIT Associate Professor Jacob Chakareski. Chakareski and his team, collaborating with peers from University of Massachusetts-Amherst, devised a system to make network requests err on the side of smallness and upscale the difference through a neural network running on the receiving hardware. They call it BONES — Buffer Occupancy-based Neural-Enhanced Streaming — which will be presented at the ACM…

NJIT’s annual celebration of its top student researchers kicked off at the 2024 Dana Knox Student Research Showcase, which once again highlighted a stunning array of innovation and discovery from every corner of the STEM disciplines. Now in its 19th year, the showcase competition featured 68 diverse research projects presented by students from NJIT’s six colleges at the university Campus Center. As always, Dana Knox presenters had the chance to connect with the campus community to explain the significant impact of research endeavors they’ve spent their undergraduate and graduate studies…

The 35th annual Scholarship Brunch took place April 12, bringing together generous benefactors who have created scholarships at NJIT with the students benefiting from their support. The event humanizes and demonstrates the impact of giving back and removing a financial burden to those who need it most. In a unique opportunity, scores of scholars attended with each one proudly representing — and meeting — their donors.  Zooming out, the aggregate numbers are impressive: $40 million in financial aid was provided for the 2023-2024 academic year. With more than 90% of NJIT’s first-year…

Navya Martin Kollapally M.S. ’21 (Computer Science), and a 2024 Ph.D. candidate, has been honored with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Reviewer Award for her work in support of the 2024 AMIA Informatics Summit, held in Boston this past March. The award is given to peer reviewers based on effort, dedication and fieldwork on their subject of expertise. Her research focuses on social determinants of health through non-clinical factors. She previously co-authored a paper titled “Integrating Commercial and Social Determinants of Health: A Unified Ontology for Non-Clinical…