Ishaan Tilva, a first-year computer science major from Columbia, MD, participated in SCI's second annual high school-to-college summer bridge program, this past August. Here, he shares how the program was an impactful start to his Pitt journey, and how it set him up for success as a first-year student.
Jamie Allen (IS ’93), a member of the SCI Board of Visitors, now gets the chance to see his daughter Sophie Allen, a first-year student at SCI, following in his footsteps.
The Colorful Backgrounds EXPO, a 12-week reentry program led by Pittsburgh nonprofit West End P.O.W.E.R. and the Pennsylvania Interfaith Impact Network (PIIN), recently partnered with School of Computing and Information (SCI) assistant professor Aakash Gautam to provide digital literacy training and future envisioning tools that support returning citizens as they reenter their communities.
SCI researchers including Dr. Michael Lewis (DINS), Lucia Romero, a master’s student studying information science, and SCI alum Huao Li (MSIS ’19, PhD ’25) received a Best Paper Award at a Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Workshop. This study introduces TALENTS, a novel framework that enables artificial agents to adapt to human partners in real-time.
Xiaowei Jia, an associate professor with the Department of Computer Science, has received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) award of $384,203 to focus on the hidden signatures in water isotopes, specifically rare forms of hydrogen and oxygen that act as natural recorders of Earth’s climate history.
Rebecca Morris, a Teaching Associate Professor with SCI’ s Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship, and MLIS alumna Annie Malady were published in the May 2025 issue of Library Trends. Their article, titled “Facing the Questions Together: Faculty and Student Perspectives on Integrating Generative AI in LIS Education,” explores collaborative viewpoints facing educators and students at Pitt and beyond.
Inspired by the New York Times’ Connections game, César Guerra-Solano (SCI ‘26) proposed adapting the puzzle into a multilingual, culture-specific word grouping game, giving large language models (LLM’s) the task of identifying patterns and generating explanations for their groupings.
Peter Brusilovsky (Director, Intelligent Systems Program; professor, Department of Informatics and Networked Systems) is one of three keynote speakers for the 36th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media.
Adriana Kovashka, Chair of the Department of Computer Science, received an NSF grant to support her project the Representational Reasoning Assistant (RRA), which will help advance interdisciplinary research and practices in AI, computer science, learning sciences, and STEM learning.
What advice do SCI alumni have for the library industry? For Alexia Hudson-Ward, the newly-appointed Dean of the Library at Georgetown University, it is to “pursue this profession with all the vigor and delight you can imagine – there is no other industry that has so many tentacles. Information science underpins everything.”
As AI continues to seep into our day-to-day lives, a question that many often find themselves wondering is how this new technology will affect their careers. SCI Assistant Professor Morgan Frank is collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University’s Block Center for Technology and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) FutureTech, University of Virginia, the California Policy Lab, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation to create a wide-ranging research effort focused on understanding AI’s labor implications using high-resolution data.
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