News

There were many outstanding performers at George Mason University this past academic year, from musicians to actors to athletes. Less celebrated but no less impressive was the virtuoso performance of a determined IT major at a job fair, a star turn that commanded the attention of University Career Services representatives.

The Mason Nation’s strength was undeniable at several hackathons in spring 2023. Computer science, cybersecurity engineering, information technology, and mechanical engineering students won challenges on March 25 at the University of Virginia, on April 7-9 at the University of Maryland, and on April 29-30 at Drexel University.

IST Assistant Professor Nora McDonald makes it a priority to help her students learn how to ask the right empathetic questions while teaching Human Computer Interaction (HCI), one of IST’s newest concentrations.

With two new recently added concentrations in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at George Mason University, graduate students have a cutting edge in machine learning and user experience (UX) design.

Four of the twelve Mason faculty members being honored with Presidential Awards for Faculty Excellence come from the College of Engineering and Computing. They include Giorgio Ascoli, Zhisheng Yan, Jonathan Auerbach, and Shvetha Soundararajan.

At a Computing Career Reception, juniors and seniors in CS and IST networked with tech industry representatives from companies such as Appian, Brillient, and Verisign.

Missy Cummings, one of the country’s first female fighter pilots and the director of Mason’s autonomy and robotics center, calls herself a tech futurist, charged with making tech work and helping it get better. She isn’t shy about calling out bad tech either, including the vision systems in self-driving cars and Tesla’s Autopilot.

George Mason IT alumni took home a win for creating a database that houses historical data in Fairfax County on African American facts.

College of Engineering alumna Shawn Purvis received Distinguished Alumni Award at the university's annual Celebration of Distinction.

Mason freshmen Pranay Yella and Pranav Reddippali were on the team that took second place at the Mason/Amazon 2022 Bring Down Counterfeiting Public Policy Hackathon.

A recent paper by Department of Information Sciences and Technology assistant professor Zhisheng Yan received the Best Student Paper Award at ACM Multimedia Systems (MMSys) 2022 conference held in Athlone, Ireland.

Associate Professor Max Albanese collaborated with Palo Alto Research Center to launch the Mason Vulnerability Scoring Framework, a tool that publishes continuously updated rankings of the most-common global software weaknesses. The work has resulted in multiple pending patent applications and a Best Paper Award at the 19th International Conference on Security and Cryptography.