Department of Informatics

HackNJIT, Back From Online Hiatus, Brings Creative Apps and Gadgets

Thursday, November 10, 2022
Camping isn't the first hobby you associate with an urban campus, but the outdoors theme was a hit at HackNJIT this month, held fully in-person for the first time since 2019 because of the COVID pandemic. Approximately 200 students from New Jersey Institute of Technology, and from neighbors such as Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Rutgers and Stevens Institute, registered for the annual tribute to API calls and soldering irons. Chief organizer David Garcia, president of NJIT's Association for Computing Machinery chapter, said he was proud to return the event to its former level. "It...

NJIT Experts in Augmented Reality Help Train Caretakers for the Elderly

Thursday, October 27, 2022
With the world's population of geriatric patients increasing faster than enough caretakers can be trained for the difficult job, NJIT Assistant Professor of Informatics Salam Daher thinks augmented reality technology may help close the gap. Daher and her students are prototyping a digital model of an older person which is aware of its feelings and environment. Existing models only cover physical aspects, so it's opening new ground to have a patient simulator that teaches caretakers about the emotional and psychological aspects of their daily work. This could attract more people to the...

Murray Turoff: A Pioneer of Instant Messaging

Thursday, October 20, 2022
Long before social networks, instant messengers, web forums, Internet Relay Chat, AOL, Compuserve, and dial-up bulletin board systems, there was EIES – Electronic Information Exchange System, pronounced like the word eyes.  Developed by Distinguished Professor Emeritus Murray Turoff back in 1976, EIES is considered among the first computer-mediated, multimachine communications and conferencing systems, and a precursor to the widespread interactive communication features available today. Professor Turoff passed away Sept. 28, 2022. He left an indelible legacy that extends beyond his...

Students Will Design Hacking Apps, Hardware Exploits to Gain Experience

Thursday, October 6, 2022
New Jersey Institute of Technology students are forming a pair of computer security groups this semester, with the mutual goal of preparing students to hone their skills beyond the classroom. One group is NICC — NJIT Information and Cybersecurity Club — and the other is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group of (virtual) Breaking and Entering. Leaders of both groups make it clear that they don't teach or condone illegal activities. Instead, they're devoted to educating members on how to identify system weaknesses and protect against those. NICC was inspired...

Ying Wu College of Computing Matches Record Enrollment with 17 New Instructors for Fall 2022

Monday, October 3, 2022
Six new assistant professors have been appointed to the faculty of Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC) for the 2022-2023 academic year. They are joined by 11 professors of practice, university lecturers and senior university lecturers who will support the College’s ever-growing enrollment numbers.  The new instructors will play a pivotal role in delivering a robust education based on real-world experience and research immediately transferrable to industry. They collectively bring a breadth of expertise in the fields of cybersecurity, neural networks, virtual reality (VR), artificial...

Ying Wu College of Computing Shatters Enrollment Records in Fall 2022

Thursday, September 15, 2022
Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC) continues its upward trajectory as an NJIT enrollment leader, achieving a 17% increase relative to last year for a total of almost 4,100 students enrolled for the Fall 2022 semester. As such, YWCC now represents 34% of the entire NJIT student body for the new academic year. Close to 23% of YWCC students are women, up from 21% two years ago. The College is one of the few in the U.S. that is devoted entirely to computing disciplines and is the largest and most comprehensive in the region. It offers students a broad array of interactive, practice-based...

NJIT Hosts Multimedia Retrieval Forum to Make Smarter Info Networks

Thursday, July 28, 2022
New Jersey Institute of Technology hosted the 12th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval with in-person and remote participants focusing on critical, societal and technical presentations in the art of searching for vivid data online. It's easy to find single-type data such as text, whether you're using a consumer-oriented tool like Google or a professional application made for investigators and scientists, but the state-of-the-art for retrieving multimedia data is murky, experts at the conference said. Years of experiments and papers have led to simple functions such as...

Entire Computing Capstone Project Team Hired by Corporate Sponsor

Wednesday, July 13, 2022
Many Capstone projects, proposed by a company and performed by a team of students as a senior-year course requirement in the Ying Wu College of Computing, are successful enough to be developed further by the sponsoring company. On occasion, a student or two will be fortunate enough to receive an employment offer from the company as a result of their good work. It is far less common, however, for an entire Capstone team, let alone two entire Capstone teams of the same semester and sponsor, to be hired – and made full partners in the company. Such is the case for eight students whose Eco-...

Use of Twitter Helped Taliban Regain Control in Afghanistan, Researchers Find

Wednesday, July 6, 2022
Twitter was a strategic tool for Taliban operations in overthrowing the Afghanistan leadership during the country’s civil war, and some accounts associated with the oppressive group triggered the company's algorithms to promote ads for well-known Western brands, researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology, Princeton University and University of Regina found. "The current perception is that social media platforms moderate malicious actors and violent extremist content, this report demonstrates that this is patently untrue, at least in the case of Twitter," the...

Listening to Noise and Nature With Smart Ears

Sunday, June 26, 2022
Filing a noise complaint is a bit of a gamble. By the time an inspector arrives, the stream of trucks thundering by the night before may be long gone or the construction tools bedeviling the dinner hour turned off. In a dense soundscape, even pinpointing the worst offender can be a challenge. Was it a jackhammer or a tamping machine making that repetitive racket? Where logistics, human perceptual capabilities or simple manpower may fall short, however, smart acoustic sensors are being trained to succeed. Endowed with machine listening, the auditory sibling to computer vision, these cutting...

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