Penn State Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology
College of Information Sciences and Technology
Managing Information, Powering Intelligence
Penn State Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology
Managing Information, Powering Intelligence
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At the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), innovation and engaged scholarship are two pillars that drive the college’s growth. Two crucial elements that support these ideals are the Dean’s Excellence Fund and the College of IST Future Fund, which offer unrestricted financial resources to address IST’s most pressing needs and create opportunities for students.
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With over 500 million tweets sent every single day, new research from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) is investigating innovative ways to use that data to help communities respond during unexpected catastrophes.
While local governments and relief organizations can measure a community’s ability to respond to a disaster or measuring its impacts after, they’ve never been able to monitor the effects in real time.
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Clara Ocneanu, a 2015 graduate of the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), says the company she works for, Xerox, reminds her of IST in an important way.
The well-known developer of industry-leading technology prides itself on its diverse and inclusive atmosphere. Ocneanu says she has been lucky to experience the same environment at Xerox as she did in her time in IST.
Image: Erin Cassidy Hendrick
For Penn State undergraduate student Yuya Ong, data sciences isn’t just his major — it’s a way of thinking about life.
“[I’m able to] understand and conceptualize the link between how humans develop an understanding of the world around them,” he said. “Data science is the generator that will leverage all of that from now and into the future.”
Image: Chase Kelly
Chase Kelly, a United States Navy veteran and graduating senior in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), thought attending Penn State World Campus meant that although he’d have the flexibility of an online education, he’d be missing out on the social interactions of a resident program. But as he approached his graduation, he says he got the best of both worlds.
“No one I know who went to another online school has anything to say about the student experience,” he said. “[I do], when I talk about all I’ve done and the family that is Penn State.”
Image: Erin Cassidy Hendrick
Xiao Liu, a doctoral student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), was recently awarded a bronze medal for her research during the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Graduate Student Research Competition at the 2017 Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) Conference held in Barcelona, Spain.
Her research is focused on enhancing regular expressions, or “regex,” a tool that computer programmers often use for security purposes, including virus detection. Although users wouldn’t come across regex, computer programmers use it to filter valid inputs, such as phone numbers. The back-end programming is designed to reject any string of characters that doesn’t fit, such as including a letter in a phone number.
Image: Tuft & Needle Mattress
The news that bed-in-a-box e-commerce company Tuft & Needle is getting in bed with the “devil,” a.k.a. Amazon, to open a new showroom in Seattle, Amazon’s home town, is important, not just for mattress retailers in particular but the retail market in general. Let’s look first at its broader implications for retail, then drill down into the increasingly competitive and complicated mattress market.
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Baris Kandemir, a doctoral candidate in Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology, is spending his summer interning at DeepMap, a startup company in Palo Alto, California, that makes high-definition recognition maps for autonomous cars.
Creating these maps is a crucial step in the development of the emerging technology of autonomous vehicles, but it’s no easy task. It requires advanced equipment and precision measurements to accurately map the environment and avoid catastrophe.
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For his insightful work into battling extremism on college campuses, Peter Forster, associate dean for online and professional education at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), has received a recognition from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary John Kelly.
Along with Penn State President Eric Barron, Forster served as a task force lead on the Academic Advisory Council for DHS. In this role, Penn State is contributing meaningful academic research to battle the global war against terrorism.
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A new bachelor of science degree in Cybersecurity Analytics and Operations offered by Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) will help meet the growing demand for cybersecurity professionals. The degree will be available to students at the University Park campus beginning in the fall 2017 semester.
The program is one of the first of its kind in the nation, and will equip students with the knowledge and skills needed to critically assess and respond to modern information security threats, according to Peng Liu, professor of IST and one of the program’s developers. The college designed the new degree in response to a critical gap in cybersecurity education.