TTI/Vanguard, a prestigious organization of technology industry executives who meet a few times each year to study and debate emerging innovations, chose to virtually visit New Jersey Institute of Technology this week for their latest intellectual retreat. The group's members, through exposure to wide swaths of cutting-edge technology research, advise their clients and employers about what directions to follow for commercialization and investment opportunities. The visit of 58 thought leaders from academia, corporations and government agencies — including Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock…

Assistant Professor Cody Buntain, NJIT's expert on the science of understanding social media, is turning his trained eyes to the connections between online misinformation and public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Using software that he co-developed in 2017 with University of Waterloo Professor Jimmy Lin, which identifies high-impact moments on Twitter, Buntain will compare relevant tweets about the coronavirus to actions among the people of countries including Brazil, Italy, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. His research is supported by a six-month, $138,000 grant from the U…

GirlHacks went virtual this year, with extra-diverse participation and several healthcare-oriented projects, all due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event, which was hosted Oct. 10-11 by NJIT's Women in Computing Society, had almost 80 entrants spanning 28 projects from colleges and even high schools across the U.S. and beyond. "I think we had a lot of engagement considering the fact that this was in a pandemic. People worked an entire weekend building their projects. It was very inspiring to me. … No one would have thought this event would have been possible completely virtually when the…

About two dozen experts on data science are giving seminars to the NJIT community this semester and next, with many of them excited to participate virtually from far away with the students and faculty here in New Jersey . David Bader, director of NJIT's Institute for Data Science, said he is excited to host such prestigious guest speakers representing academia, government and industry. While the Institute hosted several guest speakers in the past year, such as the chief data scientist from The New York Times last spring, the broad scope of this year’s series covers more real-life…

Ying Wu College of Computing at NJIT welcomed this fall four new faculty members. Focused on expanding its footprint in research and teaching, these strategic faculty hires are an important element of that effort, bringing an impressive depth and breadth of knowledge to the college and its students. “I am delighted to welcome our newest faculty members to Ying Wu College of Computing,” said Dean Craig Gotsman. “Even with the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic, our enrollment for the current academic year is up and we are blessed with an enthusiastic and diverse student body. We are…

In a lab dedicated to developing novel technologies for positive social interaction and trying to understand how people use social technologies, such as social media, mobile phones, and multiplayer games, it is the face-to-face, in-person relationships that students have with each other, faculty, and researchers that attracts them and brings them back year after year. Ask Dr. Yvette Wohn what she thinks about that, and she will tell you that she would have it no other way. Wohn launched the Social Interaction Lab, also known as the Social X Lab, seven years ago when she saw an…

NJIT's student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery dates back to the 1970s but they've had no semester quite like fall 2020 with all events being virtual. Their annual HackNJIT event (November 7-8), along with the NJIT Women in Computing Society's GirlHacks (October 10-11), are both exclusively online this fall. For the HackNJIT event, "We're still working out the final exact details," explained ACM Chapter President Evan Markowitz, a fourth-year student from Hackettstown majoring in computer science. "Our plan is to have a 24-hour Twitch livestream. We're…

The handshakes will be virtual at this fall’s career fair at NJIT. In fact, the entire fair will take place online via Handshake, the career networking platform that the university uses to match employers with students seeking jobs, internships and co-operative education opportunities.  More than 115 companies, government agencies and nonprofits are participating in the fair, which will take place Sept. 25 from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Among the participants are Facebook, Colgate-Palmolive, Merck, CenturyLink, the FBI, General Dynamics, Turner Construction, the New York State Department…

As students return to campus this fall, NJIT and universities around the country face the challenge of adhering to COVID-19 preventative measures such as social distancing and mask use, while also maximizing the usage of the available resources and learning spaces on campus. One of the techniques deployed at NJIT is converged learning, where only a fraction of the students enrolled in a course are physically present in a classroom while the remainder participate online. While seemingly a simple idea, coordinating this process for thousands of students across hundreds of course sections, with…

Three master's degrees and five graduate certificate programs are now available to Ying Wu College of Computing students in the NJIT​ @​JerseyCity location. Programs at the Exchange Place location opened in fall 2019 offering a Master of Science in Data Science along with graduate certificates in big data, data mining and data visualization. About 100 graduate students are already studying there. The two new master of science programs being added this fall are in computer science, and in cybersecurity and privacy. Additional graduate certificates in the same topics will also be offered. The…