Through the university’s partnership with Strive for College, an online college mentoring platform, NJIT students are invited to participate in a free pilot program over the next year aimed at helping them complete their courses, earn a degree and prepare for living-wage careers after college. Strive On enables students to select a volunteer mentor, from companies that include American Express, Deloitte and EY, and work one-on-one with him/her to choose courses, fill out the FAFSA, pursue scholarships, identify career options based on skills and strengths, and more. Additionally, the program…

A recent graduate in computer science played a small but important role in fixing the city of Newark's problem of lead in its public water supply. The student, Sammy Faraj, did his part by developing a database and mobile application for Newark-based Roman E&G Corp., which needed to organize photographs of where its workers were replacing outdated lead pipes with modern copper ones for the city government’s remediation project. Company managers there were organizing thousands of pictures manually, with several dozen for each home showing details such as the location, original pipes,…

Ten public universities and colleges in New Jersey have joined forces and issued a call for the over 100,000 state residents who attend higher education institutions out-of-state to return home, enroll in New Jersey institutions, and help rebuild the state as part the New Jersey Scholar Corps program. The participating four-year institutions in the NJ Come Home Program are New Jersey Institute of Technology, Montclair State University, Rowan University, Kean University, New Jersey City University, Ramapo College, Stockton University, The College of New Jersey, Thomas Edison State…

Class of 2020 graduates have until this Tuesday, May 5, to order their Commencement regalia and have it shipped to them. Wearing Commencement regalia is necessary to participate in NJIT’s virtual Commencement ceremony, to be held Friday, June 12. Students are urged to visit the Commencement website for details on ordering Commencement regalia. The website provides additional important information, including the deadlines for students to submit the correct pronunciation of their name, as well as photos and videos. The website will be continually updated prior to Commencement.

Informatics department Assistant Professor Hai Phan is studying how to protect privacy in mobile applications that track a user's behavior. Phan received a $100,000 grant from a major technology company for the project, Detecting Human Behaviors from Smartphones Using Federated Machine Learning in the Wild. For example, he said, developers of applications that book taxi services or provide pizza delivery might want to use algorithms to determine optimal driver locations and times. To do so, applications need to track device owners' movements and activities to learn when you're mostly like…

NJIT's Senjuti Basu Roy, assistant professor of computer science, received a prestigious National Science Foundation award announced this month for her research addressing inefficiencies of deploying tasks in crowdsourced labor services.  The award is from the NSF's Faculty Early Career Development Program, widely known as CAREER in academic spheres. It is an acknowledgement for early career activities of scholars who integrate research and education in the context of their organizations, the NSF states. Basu Roy, an expert on optimizing machine learning techniques, won more than $100,…

A team of teachers in Morris and Essex counties, looking to do their part to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic, has produced almost 500 face masks, 700 face shields and 1,400 ear guards, led by NJIT alumna Jessica Liatys of the class of 2010. Liatys teaches technology education at Chatham Middle School. She honed her STEM chops with a bachelor's degree in information technology, following that up with a master's in network security in 2016. She received permission from her district to take home two 3D printers and was soon joined by eight of her peers in Chatham, Livingston and Madison…

The healthcare process of identifying who traveled close to contagious patients, known as contact tracing, typically assumes a lack of privacy — but NJIT cybersecurity expert Kurt Rohloff said his software is a good match to fix this. Rohloff is known in the computer security field for his work in homomorphic encryption, which is a method of processing private information without decrypting it or exposing the sensitive parts. The method has roots in defense and intelligence applications, but is also useful for healthcare and the COVID-19 pandemic, he observed, in a recent United Nations…

A team of environmental engineers at NJIT is developing a new way to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, by combining advanced statistical methods with models that incorporate environmental conditions, such as wind speed, temperature and social distancing. To date, modelers are largely tracking the growth in the number of cases and adjusting their projections as the numbers change, attributing flattening curves, for example, to social measures. With funding from a National Science Foundation RAPID (Rapid Response Research) grant, the NJIT team is creating a model that will…

For doctoral student Gayani Gunarathna, the Ph.D. Professional Development Series of seminars offered by NJIT’s Graduate Studies Office (GSO) has been a boon as she gets set to launch her career. Gunarathna, who will be a geotechnical engineer in New York City for WSP USA, a global engineering professional services firm, said she has a lot of useful information to draw upon from the series. The GSO began holding the seminars this past fall, with the goal to assist students in both improving their productivity and becoming more effective in securing jobs after graduating. The topics have…