Partnerships Flourish in Industrial Affiliates Program

As companies increasingly seek outside help to understand and implement emerging technologies such as data science and artificial intelligence, Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC) is playing an increasingly broader role in helping companies achieve this goal.

YWCC does this through its Industrial Affiliates Program (IAP), a platform to nurture corporate partnerships, providing opportunities for companies, students and faculty in employment, training and joint research and development.

As the greater New York region's only dedicated computing college, YWCC "has a wealth of expert faculty and students who are pushing computing science and technology forward in innovative and transformational ways,” Dean Craig Gotsman said. Through the IAP, "we have established numerous working relationships with companies interested in taking advantage of the unique expertise we can provide. We are proud of these relationships and always ready to expand them as a trusted partner of more companies, regionally and nationally.”

Projects with Hearst Magazines, Johnson & Johnson, North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA) and United Parcel Service (UPS) are examples of such industry partnerships.

Hearst sought NJIT's help to train employees in data science and then asked for further training in data analysis and visualization from Assistant Professor Aritra Dasgupta. NJTPA had Associate Professor Xinyue Ye use AI to evaluate a database of sidewalks. YWCC worked with UPS on applying machine learning methods to improve package delivery times, and also trained UPS employees in several data science courses. Other partnering companies included AT&T, Facebook, Google, Merck, Microsoft and Prudential.

The IAP is run by Dina Anello, YWCC’s director of external relations, and Munir Cochinwala, YWCC’s chief technology officer. 

“If you graduated 5 years ago, you knew nothing about data science and artificial intelligence. Unless you keep training them, your employees are going to be quickly outdated, and you cannot replace employees every five years," explained Cochinwala about the value of the expertise coming out of YWCC. 

The cycle will continue, he noted, as technology continues to evolve at breakneck speeds. 

“Students who graduated last year will not have studied quantum computing and will need to be trained from scratch when this becomes more prevalent in the second half of the decade. This is a big opportunity for us to lead the way," he said. (A course became available for graduate students for the first time last semester.)

Not all of the needs of corporate partners are so exotic. Sometimes companies request traditional software development or even field evangelism for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson wanted the latter. They looked to NJIT students for help with the J&J Technology Awareness Program, teaching high school students in underserved communities about career options in STEM. YWCC and J&J provided students the opportunity to mentor the high schoolers in a competition-style event, where the best teams won cash prizes and letters of recommendation from J&J for college admissions materials.

Now entering its fourth year, Anello said the program has become popular among high school students from target communities who are looking to hone their skills in a real-world setting, and then choosing NJIT for their undergraduate experience.

Other universities may be better known, “but at NJIT, we deliver," Cochinwala observed. "Students that come here actually get to work on real-world industry problems. That’s how they end up getting hired by the best companies.”