Imaginative lighting designs by Yael Erel, a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) assistant professor of architecture, and some of her students are featured in the upcoming Troy Glow installation, which opens with the Victorian Stroll on December 4.

Students in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Bachelor of Arts in Architecture program contributed to the winning proposal in the recent Radical Innovation Awards competition, which challenges creative thinkers and designers at the professional and student level to pioneer compelling innovations in travel, hospitality, and architecture.

Eco Resilience Games from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has released the first augmented reality (AR) game focusing on the growing issue of harmful algae blooms. Algae Bloom Dynamics uses AR technology to create a stylized photo-realistic, lake-island aquatic ecosystem where users walk around the immersive habitat to discover information that can help find solutions to the human behaviors and environmental factors that cause harmful algae blooms.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer will be the Community Read for the upcoming academic year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The original goal of human-like artificial intelligence was abandoned decades ago in favor of less ambitious approaches, two cognitive scientists argue in a new book. If that initial vision is to be realized, they say, AI systems will require a full understanding of language and meaning, the development of which remains a daunting — but doable — challenge. In Linguistics for the Age of AI, published by MIT Press, co-authors Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg, both faculty in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-directors of the Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents Lab, present a novel approach to language processing for AI systems.

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.

Claudia Sanchez and her classmates at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute had been looking forward to seeing their Creative Seminar work on display in the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy. As graduating students in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS), this gallery show was supposed to be the culmination of four years of intense learning and hard work.

TROY, N.Y. — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is among the best places in the country to pursue an undergraduate degree in game design or animation, according to recent rankings from Animation Career Review.

Recent work by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is demonstrating how data from online games can help provide meaningful insights.