News

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute community contributed more than $70,000 for the Rensselaer 2020 United Way campaign.

A new grant from the National Institute On Aging at the National Institutes of Health will support ongoing research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to address Alzheimer’s disease caused by gene mutations. According to Chunyu Wang, the principal investigator and an assistant professor of biological sciences at Rensselaer, the project seeks to understand and counter the mechanism that produces Amyloid-Beta 42 peptide in brain cells.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has inducted eight individuals into the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame. Conceived in 1995, the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame was created to honor the past while celebrating all generations of Rensselaer pioneers. “These distinguished Rensselaer graduates truly embody the growing legacy of innovation and change that Rensselaer alumni and alumnae have brought to the world for almost two centuries,” said Chuck Rancourt ’70, chair of the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame Selection Committee.

Warnings about misinformation are now regularly posted on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms, but not all of these cautions are created equal. New research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that artificial intelligence can help form accurate news assessments — but only when a news story is first emerging. 

Hudson Valley Community College has long been a pipeline for students to attend Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and now those interested in starting their engineering degree at the SUNY community college and transferring to the prestigious four-year university can follow a newly-updated transfer agreement between the neighboring Troy institutions.

Daniel Gall, a professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has received the 2021 Bill Sproul Award and Honorary International Conference on Metallurgical Coatings and Thin Films (ICMCTF) Lectureship Award from the American Vacuum Society (AVS).

The inaugural Vicarious Visions Pathfinder Award has been awarded to Jingyu Zhuang, a dual-major senior studying game development and computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, for — among other accomplishments — a game he created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A computer’s ability to convincingly respond to questions like a person — thereby “passing” what has come to be known as the Turing Test — is widely regarded as a practical measure of artificial intelligence. But Bram van Heuveln, a lecturer in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, contends that this common interpretation misses the important point that British mathematician Alan Turing was trying to make in his 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Van Heuveln makes the case for a new understanding of the Turing Test in a chapter of the book Great Philosophical Objections to Artificial Intelligence: The History and Legacy of the AI Wars, published this month by Bloomsbury.

As cancer and tumor cells move inside the human body, they impart and are subject to mechanical forces. In order to understand how these actions affect cancer cell growth, spread, and invasion, a team of engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is developing new models that mimic aspects of the mechanical environment within the body, providing new insight into how and why tumors develop in certain ways.

Blood sample analysis showed that, two to five years after they gave birth, mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) had several significantly different metabolite levels compared to mothers of typically developing children. That’s according to new research recently published in BMC Pediatrics by a multidisciplinary team from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Arizona State University, and the Mayo Clinic.