Just shy of 50 teams of students from area high schools and around the world will compete at the 2024 New York Tech Valley FIRST ® Robotics Competition at MVP Arena March 22-23, 2024. Inventor Dean Kamen founded FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) in 1989 to inspire an appreciation of science and technology in young people. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute hosted the first regional event in 2014 and has been a major sponsor ever since.

With the CHIPS and Science Act, the United States’ commitment to becoming a global leader in semiconductor manufacturing once again was formalized. After the recent global chips shortage, combined with the pervasiveness of chips in our everyday products from refrigerators, to cars, to watches, it is now a national priority to ensure that semiconductors are produced domestically for economic and security reasons.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Deborah McGuinness, Ph.D., has been elected a fellow of the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, “for contributions to knowledge technologies including ontologies and knowledge graphs.” McGuinness is one of 68 fellows selected by her peers to receive the honor for transformative contributions to computing science and technology.

When you try a new restaurant or book a hotel, do you consider the online reviews? Do you submit online reviews yourself? Do you pay attention if they are filtered and moderated? Does that impact your own online review submissions? A research team comprising of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s T. Ravichandran, Ph.D., professor in the Lally School of Management, and Jason Kuruzovich, Ph.D., associate professor in the Lally School of Management; and Lianlian Jiang, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, examined these questions in recently published research.