Computing Quarterly: February 2024

RIT was one of 19 teams to earn a $1 million award through the National Science Foundation Civic Innovation Challenge. The challenge brings together academic and civic partners to address the needs of different communities.

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

AI RESEARCH TEAM PUBLISHES FINDINGS ON GENERATIVE HARMFUL CONTENT

Researchers introduce novel "Toxicity Rabbit Hole" framework for evaluating LLM guardrails. Findings will be presented at AAAI in February.

GAME RELEASE

GAME CREATED BY NEARLY 60 STUDENTS, FACULTY AND STAFF NOW AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ON STEAM g

That Damn Goat features environments in which characters battle for a crown while adjusting to constant chaos — such as the world or a player’s character changing — caused by a rogue goat. Developed by the RIT community in College of Computing and College of Art and Design, game will next be released on Nintendo Switch.

STUDENT HIGHLIGHT

RIT ESPORTS WINS NATIONAL COLLEGIATE COUNTER-STRIKE 2 CHAMPIONSHIP

On Dec. 3, the Counter Strike 2 team won the 2023 Grand Finals of the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE) Varsity Premier league—the most competitive league that NACE offers. This is RIT’s eighth national championship in esports.

STUDENT HIGHLIGHT

TOP CYBERSECURITY STUDENTS ATTACK AT RIT'S COLLEGIATE PENETRATION TESTING COMPETITION

The world’s greatest collection of cybersecurity talent assembled at Rochester Institute of Technology Jan. 11-14 for the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) global finals. The annual event wrapped up the largest offense-based cybersecurity competition for college students, which is hosted annually by RIT.

A team of students from Princess Sumaya University for Technology in the country of Jordan took home the top CPTC trophy. Stanford University placed second and University of Massachusetts Amherst placed third.

RIT RESEARCHERS IN THE NEWS: FEBRUARY 2024

Professor Hanif Rahbari along with Ph.D. student Geoff Twardokus published "When Cryptography Needs a Hand: Practical Post-Quantum Authentication for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications as part of the 2024 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium.

Professor Jonathan Weissman spoke with Polygon for their piece, "The catastrophe of the Insomniac hack goes way beyond leaked games," about the impact of a cyber attack against game development studio Insomniac.

Cybersecurity Chair and deepfake detection researcher Matthew Wright was quoted in Politico piece on the "AI Trust Deficit" and the threat deepfakes pose to elections.

The Montreal AI Ethics Institute highlighted Professor Ashique Khudabukhsh's work on the "Toxicity Rabbit Hole" framework for evaluating guardrails against generative hateful content in LLM's like Google's PaLM2.

Rajendra K. Raj, professor of computer science, published an opinion article on undergraduate computer science curricula in the February issue of Communications of the ACM. Raj and his co-authors discuss conflicting goals of designing an undergraduate computer science program, such as immediate employability, long-term career success in a constantly changing discipline, and preparation for future study. Recommendations are included in Computer Science Curricula 2023, a multi-year, all-volunteer effort, co-led by Raj, that will impact computer science education internationally.

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