Student game designers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and other schools including Champlain College and Rochester Institute of Technology gathered at EMPAC Saturday to showcase a vast array of video games they had designed at the 10th annual GameFest. This was my first GameFest and I was so impressed by the sheer number of games on […]

How many individual zebras are represented in this collage of 10 photos? If we were looking at human faces, most of us would have little trouble differentiating between multiple photos of the same person, and photos of different people. But when it comes to wildlife, people are easily stumped. Not so for computers. If the […]

Rick Mastracchio, a 1987 graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a NASA astronaut currently aboard the International Space Station, took questions from Rensselaer students Friday. The event was coordinated with Mastracchio’s three alma maters – Rensselaer, UConn, and University of Houston-Clear Lake. Six students from each institution were selected to ask Mastracchio questions and the […]

(Rensselaer civil engineering students shared some thoughts about their experience at the 2014 Geo-Wall competition, held this February in Atlanta by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The Rensselaer team placed third!) Every year, Rensselaer Professor Tarek Abdoun encourages his students to form a team and participate in the GeoWall competition, which is held annually […]

(Rensselaer senior Lynnette Lacek and junior Colleen Lamberson, co-presidents of university’s chapter of the Global Medical Brigades, wrote this guest post about their recent work in Panama.) In January, Rensselaer’s chapter of Global Medical Brigades traveled to the Darien Province in Panama to provide medical care to the indigenous Embera and Wounaan tribes. It was […]

Rensselaer professor Eddie Ade Knowles will be featured in a documentary about renowned jazz and soul artist Gil Scott-Heron airing Wednesday night. Knowles, an accomplished drummer, was a member of Gil Scott-Heron and the Midnight Band in the 1970s. He played the conga drums that were the beat behind one of Scott-Heron’s most notable works, “The […]

On Lake George, from the deck of the survey ship Mintaka, the threat to boats cruising past Shelving Rock near The Narrows is apparent in high resolution detail. Lurking beneath the water, where charts indicate consistent (if shallow) water, are intermittent formations of jagged hull-ripping rock ledge. Although the educated boater would be warned from […]

(Rensselaer civil engineering doctoral student Jingjing Tian iwrote this post about her experience at a huge shake-table experiment she and her adviser, Professor Michael Symans, attended last year. They are part of a multi-university research project dedicated to making buildings more resilient to earthquakes.) A full-scale, multi-story wood-framed building with soft ground story was constructed […]

Nuclear engineering expert Emily Liu is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer. We ask Emily about her work: Q: Your research is fascinating! It spans from nanomaterials, to radiation damage, to nuclear threat detection. What is the overall problem you are trying to solve? A: My research targets a […]

If you wanted to learn to speak Chinese – really speak Chinese at a level that allowed you to converse with native speakers at a high level and conduct business in China – you’d have to go to China, right? Not necessarily, thanks to the work of some Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors. They’re working to […]