Milad Mirghahari, a social media influencer known publicly as Milad Mirg, has more than six million followers each on TikTok and YouTube and is a first-generation NJIT student, Albert Dorman Honors College member and computer science major. Just like NASA astronaut Wally Schirra and Chicago Cubs pitcher Mark Leiter Jr., Mirghahari took skills honed in Newark and excelled in public. He is known not for orbiting the planet or throwing baseballs, but for making short videos that depict him trying different jobs, usually in the restaurant or retail fields. Mirghahari, his brother and a friend…

Professor Cristian Borcea from the Department of Computer Science recently returned from a brief tour of China and Japan where he presented research papers on his continuing work with federated learning for mobile devices as well as a novel approach for improving the revenue of online publishers in real-time Ad auctions. His paper on Ad auctions, done in collaboration with Forbes, was among 93 accepted out of over 1,000 submissions that were selected for presentation at the premiere research conference on Data Mining, the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2023), in…

Professor Zhi Wei in Ying Wu College of Computing’s Department of Computer Science has been elevated to IEEE Fellow status effective Jan. 1, 2024. The appointment is in recognition of his significant contributions to knowledge discovery from biological data and in the field of bioinformatics. Following a rigorous evaluation process, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients to the IEEE Board of Directors. Less than 0.1% or approximately 300 voting IEEE members worldwide are selected for this honor annually. Criteria for selection is based upon high-impact scientific…

You are here. This familiar phrase to guide finding a more expedient and less complicated direction can now be applied to the complex world of medical ontologies, thanks to research on a project led by the Ying Wu College of Computing’s Professor Jim Geller and Assistant Professor Margarita Vinnikov. A paper on their Virtual Reality Ontology Object Manipulation (VROOM) system was recently presented at the 2023 American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Symposium in New Orleans, along with a demo of the solution. Geller, along with co-principal investigators Ph.D. candidate Navya…

Associate Professor Hai Phan in Ying Wu College of Computing’s Department of Data Science has been awarded a $740,000 grant through the Qatar Research, Development and Innovation Council (QRDI) to develop a trustworthy federated learning (FL) model that will address new standards for AI safety and security as outlined in the White House’s Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. The highly competitive award is one of 18 funded out of 500+ submissions and will support ProFL, the first Private and Robust FL framework for jointly training machine learning (ML)…

New Jersey court officials are turning to NJIT’s Grace Wang, director of the university’s Center for Artificial Intelligence Research, as their technology expert for a new committee to help judges and lawyers understand AI’s role in the legal system. “Artificial intelligence is a tool that we are still learning about, and while it holds the potential for great opportunities, it can also create significant challenges within the legal community,” State Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner stated. The committee will “examine potential policies and practices in numerous areas, including the…

A new committee aims to accelerate gender equity among faculty members at New Jersey Institute of Technology. The Women Faculty Advisory Committee, chaired by Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, will hold peer forums to examine key issues based on the testimony of junior faculty members. It also intends to poll women faculty to gather quantitative data. Both will fuel an action plan and create a foundation for measuring progress toward faculty gender diversity.  Women are particularly underrepresented among full-time faculty at NJIT, most starkly at the level of professor, where they represent just…

Parth Mehta ’19, doesn’t believe in the question of “where do you want to be in five years?” According to him, since you cannot predict the future, don’t aim to build for five years ahead – build it now. When the information technology graduate founded Startup Tribes, his effort to bring startup and entrepreneurial support to the masses, he primarily relied upon sheer will and the conviction to settle for nothing less than 100%... the rest would be learned over time.  Now, after his company was acquired by the market leader in startup ecosystem building, Mehta at 26 runs by the…

IEEE Fellow Guiling “Grace” Wang, distinguished professor, associate dean for research, and founding director of the AI Center for Research in the Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC), has been awarded the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society 2023 Best Land Transportation Paper Award. This accolade, received four years after publication of her influential paper, “A Deep Reinforcement Learning Network for Traffic Light Cycle Control,” recognizes its significant research impact and high citation. Wang's prestigious award is a testament to her pioneering work in the field of Artificial Intelligence…

Nautical nonsense is something they wished, and it was granted at this year’s edition of HackNJIT, where almost 400 students from New Jersey Institute of Technology and many other schools completed 63 ocean-themed projects. A game called Treasure Snap — built by Peter Akdemir, Dustin La, Gabriel Pascual and Joshua Quizon — was the top NJIT finisher, second overall, for their treasure-hunting software where anyone can upload an image and its GPS coordinates, and then players must find the same location, take a picture and upload it themselves. If the location and image are a match, then you…