Patrycja Ptak, a second-year architecture student at NJIT’s Hillier College of Architecture and Design, vividly recalls the uncertainty she felt and challenges she faced navigating the college pathway — which is why she decided to become a mentor through Strive for College, an online platform that provides resources and support to aspiring and current first-generation college students, and with which NJIT is a strategic partner.  “As a first-gen college student myself, I know how difficult and daunting the college matching process is,” noted Ptak. “It was very difficult to be making…

U.S. News & World Report’s 2020 rankings for “Best Online Programs” are out, and NJIT realized gains in four graduate-study areas: business, information technology (IT), engineering and MBA. The rankings are the result of extensive assessments over the past year of more than 1,600 online degree programs nationwide, the highest number evaluated to date. The university rose to No. 82 out of 174 online Master of Business programs and to No. 34 out of 58 online Master of IT programs. It also moved up among online Master of Engineering programs to No. 53 out of 94, offering distance-learning…

Personal computing evolved from the primordial soup of electronics miniaturization in the 1960s-1970s, and before long the revolution was at full strength in University Heights. Mainframes and servers still handled administrative and research tasks in the 1970s and 1980s, as they do today, although now most computing hardware is located in external data centers accessed through the cloud. NJIT's succession of large machines following Newark College of Engineering's first IBM computer purchase in 1962 included an RCA Spectra 70, Sperry UNIVAC 90/80, various models of Digital…

Two New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) professors are part of a consortium of 10 organizations that received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to use technology to assist agencies that manage wildfires, water quality and biodiversity. Ying Wu College of Computing professors Xinyue Ye, Shaohua Wang and team will create what the NSF calls an "Open Knowledge Network" for spatial decision-support technologies. The goal is to create prototype tools and methods that will make it easier for machines to find and understand internet data, known as a semantic web, to help…

A new two-year agreement between Ocean County College and New Jersey Institute of Technology allows OCC graduates to transfer directly into NJIT colleges. The agreement went into effect on October 4, 2019 and covers NJIT's College of Science and Liberal Arts; Newark College of Engineering; Martin Tuchman School of Management; and Ying Wu College of Computing. In a ceremony at Ocean County College today, NJIT Provost Fadi Deek said our relationship with OCC is a special one. "NJIT’s relationship with Ocean County College is among the earliest with community colleges in New Jersey. Renewing…

Students from the Hunterdon County Computer Science and Applied Engineering Academy came to NJIT on Nov. 22 to participate in a study of the impact of virtual reality (VR) on learning and knowledge retention.. The event, organized by NJIT professor Lori Watrous-deVersterre, had two goals. First, to expose high school students to the world of academic research, and second, to give NJIT professors and their graduate students access to high school students to take part in user studies. “It’s a win-win for both sides,” Watrous-deVersterre said. Watrous-deVersterre said the students took part…

NJIT now has a chapter of the Google Developer Student Club. Google formed the international organization two years ago to teach real-world information technology skills that aren't necessarily taught in college classrooms. It's also a way for the software giant to promote its products and recruit new employees. "Developer Student Club launched in 2017 as a pilot in India to help solve the challenges university graduates were facing securing employment in the tech industry. We aimed to provide students with the resources, opportunities and experience necessary to be industry-ready, all…

NJIT welcomed 35 data science students to its newly opened NJIT@JerseyCity location this semester, with a goal of doubling that number in the spring and reaching 500 students in three years, Ying Wu College of Computing Dean Craig Gotsman said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony held December 5 at the new location. Gotsman said the current students are primarily working professionals in the finance and tech industries from companies located in Jersey City and also in New York City. Hudson County quickly became a technology hub following the Sept. 11 attacks and was bolstered again after Hurricane…

David Bader, distinguished professor of computer science, is the director of NJIT’s new Institute for Data Science. His interests lie at the intersection of data science and high-performance computing, with applications in cybersecurity, massive-scale analytics and computational genomics. Dr. Bader works closely with researchers in academia, industry and government to develop the next generation of computing capabilities and has advised the White House on the National Strategic Computing Initiative. What is NJIT’s new Institute for Data Science? The growing abundance and variety of data we…

Programmers can tell you what machine learning does and how it works, but they can't really prove why it works. Enter the mathematicians. The what and how of machine learning are well documented — it's software that examines big data to find meaning and possibly suggest actions, based on looking for patterns and complicated statistics — and now NJIT mathematics professor Zuofeng Shang is among a small group of researchers worldwide who want to understand and document the underlying mathematical principles of it. Shang received $250,000 in National Science Foundation grants during the last…