Last month, on May 26, Rensselaer hosted a Twitter Q & A with 2015 Commencement honorand Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree during the 209th Commencement Ceremony held at Rensselaer on Saturday, May 30. Dr. Gates is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, and cultural critic; he has authored 17 […]

Admiral Michelle Howard, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, originally posted the blog titled “Continue to Reach for Equality and Inclusiveness in All Rights,” in Navy Live on March 18, 2015, to commemorate Women’s History Month. Admiral Howard will be addressing Rensselaer graduates at the Institute’s 209th Commencement and receiving an honorary degree at the ceremony. On the […]

Just in time for swimming season, The Approach wanted to share some information on the current, and changing, state of Lake George. Since 1980, researchers at the Rensselaer Darrin Fresh Water Institute (DFWI) have tracked a series of indicators — including temperature, nutrients, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen, and transparency — in the waters of Lake George. […]

(In this guest post, Christopher J. Low, a Rensselaer graduate and IBM consultant, explains how business analytics, like a GPS system, has aided him in navigating his career.) Data has shaped a lot of my life experience so far, and now it’s also an important part of my career. In academics, numbers and information were […]

Spring is inevitable. And while ice still caps Lake George, data about the water beneath has been flowing into the Jefferson Project at Lake George throughout the cold, long winter. The winter has been a time for testing, de-bugging, and anticipation, as researchers begin working with a network of sensor platforms installed in the waning […]

A quick congratulations to RPISEC, the “resident computer security club and CTF team” at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  Club president Markus Gaasedelen, a computer science student, confirmed a report that popped up on RPI Reddit claiming a top place finish in the 12th Information Security Talent Search, as organized and hosted by Rochester Institute of Technology’s […]

Ring any bells? Readers of the Approach may remember a 2014 post on the Image-Based Ecological Information System, or IBEIS, an experimental software tool that can identify individual animals pictured in the thousands of ordinary photos taken by tourists in game parks such as Yellowstone National Park, Amboseli National Park in Kenya, or the Galapagos Islands […]

(In this guest post, School of Science Ambassadors Heili Springsteen (a sophomore mathematics student) and Jeremy Amdur (a sophomore chemistry student) share their experiences — and a few images — from their work visiting area middle and high schools to promote interest in science.) Looking back at middle school and high school, most of us […]

Rensselaer Professor Karyn Rogers wrote this guest post while cruising at 30,000 feet aboard a Boeing 737 on a flight from Albany to Managua, Nicaragua. After landing, hopefully without delay or lost luggage, she will travel to the colonial city of Leon, jumping off point for the expedition to the Cerro Negro volcano (pictured above) […]

The college application deadline is fast approaching and within a few short months, it will be decision day for millions of students who must declare where they plan to go to college. Students will take many factors into consideration when making their decision –including size of the student body, location of the institution, availability of […]