School of Computing celebrates 2024-25 accomplishments
Last fall at Binghamton University started with the Department of Computer Science upgrading to the School of Computing, still under the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science.
Renaming to a school reflects exceptional growth in student enrollment, faculty and research funding over the past decade.
In November 2024, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand stopped at Watson College to encourage Binghamton University students to apply to the DoD Cyber Service Academy scholarship program, which provides full college tuition in return for public service in the Department of Defense (DoD) or the intelligence community. While on campus, Gillibrand received a tour of two ITC lab spaces and talked with Distinguished Professor Lijun Yin about his research into detecting deepfake videos.
Here are some of the school’s other accomplishments from 2024-25.
Research news
A Stanford University study that looks at the impact of scientists worldwide identified 33 current Binghamton University faculty who were among the top 2% of all researchers in the world in their fields in 2023. Among those cited were Associate Professor Jeremy Blackburn, Distinguished Professor Lijun Yin and Professor Zhongfei “Mark” Zhang.
Associate Professor Shiqi Zhang’s research into better ways for service robots to work smoothly alongside humans in collaborative environments was featured in 2024’s Binghamton research magazine.
Thanks to generous gifts to Watson College, the High-Performance Computing Cluster has received upgrades that will make machine-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence easier to research.
Faculty news
SUNY Empire Innovation Professor Nancy Guo joined the School of Computing last fall. She has been at the forefront of the bioinformatics revolution throughout her career in academia, thanks to technological leaps in genome sequencing and data analysis.
For his contributions in the areas of automatic facial behavior analysis and recognition, SUNY Distinguished Professor Lijun Yin was recognized as an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) fellow.
Professor Zhongfei (Mark) Zhang was named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He has more than 30 patents. Zhang is also a fellow of IEEE, IAPR and AAIA. He conducts research in machine learning, data mining and knowledge discovery, multimedia information indexing and retrieval, computer vision and image understanding, and pattern recognition.
Student news
Clay Battle ‘25 and Ever Goldin ’25 took their attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) app Roadmap to the finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition last year. They met co-founder and Georgia Tech student Aaliya Jakir in their first year at Watson College.
Mike Bronikowski ’24, MS ’26, is developing BuzzHive, a technology that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to decipher between the different types of buzzing bees make, alerting beekeepers to monitor hives for issues related to excess moisture, mites and other problems that they face.
Isaac Cohen was featured in this piece about the surge in summer undergraduate research. His project explored a problem known as “multi-armed bandit tasks,” in which different options offer different outcomes, and machine learning is used to track participants’ decision-making.
Alumni news
Chinmayee Ayachit, MS ’20, was recently named the 2024-25 Mrs. India second runner-up. Since earning her degree in computer science, she works in the United States as a software engineer and model for New York Fashion Week, navigating two worlds that she hopes to bring closer together.