NJIT Magazine Spring 2014

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COMPUTING AND THE

The Rise of Cloud Computing in the 21st Century

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AT THE COMPUTING HELM Dean Marek Rusinkiewicz

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HONOR ROLL EDITION 2013 Foundation Donors

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

A MESSAGE FROM NJIT PRESIDENT JOEL S. BLOOM M A K I NG CON N EC T ION S

NJIT MAGAZINE Spring 2014

Computing technology is putting us in personal touch with one another in truly transformative ways. It is our connection to an exponentially expanding wealth of resources indispensable for education, healthcare, work and entertainment. Computing also is connecting us to new knowledge by serving as a powerful tool for research in every field.

Marek Rusinkiewicz, who was recently named dean of the College of Computing Sciences, says that the world’s computer networks are the “nervous system of society.”

The features in this issue, including a profile of Dean Rusinkiewicz, highlight NJIT’s connections to breakthroughs in computer science and engineering that affirm his assessment of the diverse and central role that computing has in the 21st century.

NJIT faculty members are taking computerized facial recognition and the protection of digital media to new levels of capability. On a different research front, they are developing computer-based tools that could help financial analysts judge the degree of confidence that corporate executives really have in the future success of their firms, as communicated by the nuances of written and spoken reports.

Cloud computing is, increasingly, a part of daily life in the 21st century. In their advertising, cloud-computing services advocate connecting to the cloud as a costeffective IT strategy for businesses of every size, and as a very attractive way for individuals to access an incredible variety of music, books, games and videos. NJIT researchers agree that the advantages of cloud computing are significant. But they are also working to develop the techniques and technology needed to protect valuable assets entrusted to the cloud from unauthorized access and digital deterioration.

It would be extremely challenging to advance these efforts on the computing frontier – as well as in all else that we seek to accomplish at NJIT – without the assistance of a growing number of concerned and generous supporters. In this issue, the annual Honor Roll of Donors lists numerous individuals and organizations connected to our university in a special way.

Through their support, our donors have established a vital connection to the success of NJIT students and researchers in computer science and every other discipline. I sincerely thank you for making the connections acknowledged in Honor Roll for 2013,

Matthew Golden Associate Vice President Communications, Marketing and Branding

and for continuing to sustain this relationship in 2014 and the years that will follow.

Joel S. Bloom President

Dean L. Maskevich Editor Christina Crovetto MS ’03 Assistant Editor Tracey Regan Contributing Writer Babette Hoyle Production Coordinator Skelton Design Design Editorial Advisory Board Charles R. Dees, Jr., E. Perry Deess, Kirstie Gentleman, Kathryn Kelly, Jacquelynn G. Rhodes, Henry Ross, Anita Rubino ’83, Steven Saperstein ’84, Michele Scott ’93, Donald H. Sebastian, Nancy Steffen-Fluhr.

NJIT Magazine is published by New Jersey Institute of Technology, Office of Strategic Communications. Its mission is to foster ties with alumni, university friends and corporate partners and to report on relevant issues, particularly those in education, science, research and technology.

Please send letters of comment and requests to reproduce material from the magazine to: NJIT Magazine Office of Strategic Communications University Heights Newark, NJ 07102-1982 Dean.Maskevich@njit.edu

Charles R. Dees, Jr. Vice President University Advancement Michael A. Wall Senior Executive Director Constituent Relations On the web: http://magazine.njit.edu

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D E PA RT M E N T S

A New Hand at the Computing Helm

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Dean Marek Rusinkiewicz brings extensive academic and industry experience to the College of Computing Sciences.

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Recognizing Faces, Reality and Corporate Sincerity

NJIT news in brief 7 P OINT BY POINT

Athletics update 16 A LUMNI CIRCUIT

Class notes, alumni calendar, and more 23 AT THE EDGE

Leading-edge achievements by faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends of NJIT

NJIT researchers are proving the increasingly diverse technical and social potential of computing.

PAG E 1 2

Computing and the Cloud Cloud computing offers irresistible benefits, but is it safe?

2013 HONOR ROLL DONOR PAG ES 1-3 0

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ABSTRACTS

ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF JHU/APL, NASA

Technologies, LLC, received individual certificates for their roles in conceiving, designing and building the RBSPICE.

VAN ALLEN REVELATIONS AND NJIT RECOGNITION NASA’s two Van Allen Probes, carrying NJIT’s Radiation Belt Storm Probes Ion Composition Experiment (RBSPICE), are shedding new light on a hazardous, little-understood region of Earth’s magnetosphere. The instrumentation has revealed, for example, hitherto undetected zones of high-energy helium ions within the Van Allen radiation belts that surround our planet, as well as the surprising revelation of bands of electrons that resemble what some investigators have called “zebra stripes.”

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In March, NJIT and its partners received word from NASA that the Van Allen Probes had met all of the scientific criteria to be designated a “Mission Success.”

None of the resulting discoveries would have been possible, however, if the instruments in orbit aboard the twin spacecraft had failed to function properly following their 2012 launch.

Such operational success is no small achievement.

So it was with considerable satisfaction that the NJIT-led RBSPICE team also received a Group Achievement Award last year from NASA citing the mission’s outstanding cost and schedule performance, as well as its groundbreaking science.

More recently, NJIT team members, along with colleagues from the Advanced Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University and Foundational

“The mission has been highly successful both in the operation of the spacecraft and in the operation of the instruments,” notes Louis Lanzerotti, distinguished research professor of physics and principal investigator for the mission.

“Almost anything you can imagine can go wrong with a space mission. The most serious, of course, is a launch failure, and then an instrument failure.”

“This is NJIT’s first spacecraftbased mission and we are ecstatic with the world-class instrument the team designed, which is producing cuttingedge science and advancing our understanding of the radiation belts,” says Professor of Physics Andrew Gerrard, director of NJIT’s Center for Solar Terrestrial Research and RBSPICE science-team member. “We have not had this level of coverage of the radiation belts since the 1980s.”

The Van Allen Probe mission, managed by Goddard Space Flight Center as part of NASA’s Living With A Star program, is tasked with investigating changes in solar-driven space weather that can disable satellites, cause communication and power-grid failures, and disrupt GPS services on Earth. n

http://physics.njit.edu http://solar.njit.edu

Drones could be used to deliver packages, conduct various types of surveys, and monitor environmental conditions. They also could help police and firefighters enhance public safety.

LAUNCHING AN UNMANNED FUTURE The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently chose six teams from across the nation to determine if unmanned aircraft – frequently called drones – can safely share the sky with aircraft that have humans on the flight deck, and to recommend standards to regulate operation of the aerial newcomers. These autonomous craft could be used to deliver packages, conduct various types of surveys, and monitor environmental conditions. They also could help police and firefighters enhance public safety.

NJIT is part of a site team that will evaluate the flying robots at locations such as the Warren Grove Air National Guard Range in Burlington County and the FAA’s William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic County.

The team, which grew out of a collaboration between New Jersey and Virginia, includes members from Virginia Tech and American Aerospace Advisers, a company partnering with NJIT.

“As the state’s science and technology university, NJIT is ideally suited to help the FAA test these unmanned aircraft,” says Research Professor Michael Chumer, Department of Information Systems. Chumer, who coordinates unmanned aircraft systems research at NJIT, is a member of the test-site team’s Policy and Strategy Committee.

NJIT houses the New Jersey Homeland Security Technology Systems Center, which is also conducting research related to unmanned aircraft systems. William Marshall, an NJIT assistant vice president who directs the center, says unmanned aircraft can play a vital role in homeland security and national emergencies.

First, however, NJIT and its partners must develop safety requirements that the FAA can recommend to Congress. Once Congress approves the recommended measures, expected in 2015, groups that want to use unmanned aircraft can apply for permission to launch them into the nation’s airspace. n http://is.njit.edu http://hls.njit.edu

Architectural rendering of Qatar’s Umm Salal Stadium

SENSING STRUCTURAL WEAKNESS NJIT has joined an international team working on an innovative system to detect dangerous weaknesses in bridges and other large structures. With a grant of just over $1 million from the Qatar National Research Fund, the team is developing a wireless sensor network to monitor vibration, sagging and other factors that affect structural integrity and safety.

The new system would not only warn of serious problems after they occur and possible impending deterioration, but also signal the need for periodic preventive maintenance.

“Our part of this project is to determine where to place the sensors, what types of data to collect, how to interpret it, and then how to make decisions about the extent of intervention needed,” says Assistant Professor Mohamed Mahgoub, director of NJIT’s Concrete Industry Management (CIM), program and one of the project’s principal investigators. “While the network can be installed on existing structures, the aim is to embed it in steel components before concrete is even poured.”

In addition to Mahgoub, the team’s principal investigators are Mohamed Hossam Ahmed, associate professor, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science at Memorial University in Canada, and Assistant Professor Tarek M. Elfouly, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Qatar University.

While significant for infrastructure protection worldwide, implementation of these safety measures is important for Qatar as the country prepares to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup soccer competition. Qatar is planning extensive infrastructure development in advance of the event, including construction of the Umm Salal Stadium to accommodate more than 45,000 people. n

http://engineeringtech.njit.edu/academics/cim

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More than 300 students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends contributed approximately 1,000 “person days” of volunteer work.

PHOTO: GLENN GOLDMAN

A PRESIDENTIAL HONOR

NJIT’s School of Art + Design, part of the College of Architecture and Design, was represented at the Greater Newark Mini Maker Faire with four exhibit stations in the garden of the Newark Museum.

FAIRE CREATIVITY Children, parents, teachers, artisans and others visited the Newark Museum on a Saturday in early April for the first Greater Newark Mini Maker Faire, billed as a “celebration of creativity and ingenuity in the New Jersey community” at the state’s largest museum.

The Faire featured demonstrations of craft and design making, hands-on workshops, and lectures by artists, designers and others pushing the limits of art, science and technology. Maker Faires (a registered trademark of Maker Media, Inc.) are held throughout the United States, attracting thousands of creative individuals who use a wide array of skills, techniques and materials to fashion their works.

The NJIT School of Art + Design was well represented at the Faire with four exhibit stations housed in a large tent in the Newark Museum’s garden.

Six faculty members (José Alcala,

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Martina Decker, Glenn Goldman, Taro Narahara, Augustus Wendell and Andrzej Zarzycki), accompanied by twenty students from the industrial and digital design programs, spent the day at the Faire.

NJIT students demonstrated digital and analog/traditional media games they had designed, printed bracelets for children on a 3D printer, displayed a series of household products created by industrial design students, and provided face-mold masks for children to decorate. Laser-cut parts NJIT students had designed were creatively assembled by children and adults into small animals or creatures, called “nijits,” imprinted with “NJIT” to take home.

Inside the museum, Decker and Zarzycki hosted a wellattended workshop, “Design Smart and Kinetic Objects.”

Alcala, university lecturer and coordinator of the industrial

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For the fifth year, NJIT has been named to The President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, one of the highest federal recognitions a college or university can receive for its commitment to volunteering, service-learning and civic engagement. Honorees are selected based on factors that include scope and innovation of service projects, percentage of student participation, incentives for service, and the extent to which the school offers academic service-learning courses.

NJIT students and staff have a long history of community service and engagement. During NJIT’s Alternative Spring Break, held from March 15 through March 22, more than 300 students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends contributed approximately 1,000 “person days” of volunteer work from Newark to the Jersey Shore, cleaning up devastated areas and helping towns rebuild resiliently.

Students cleaned debris from beaches and parks, removed and replaced floors and wallboard, painted and did carpentry, stocked and distributed food and clothing, compiled information on areas affected by Hurricane Sandy, and performed other tasks to help communities recover and rebuild. With a generous grant from the Provident Bank Foundation and support from the NJIT University Senate, Campus Center, Career Development Services, College of Architecture and Design and the Center for Resilient Design, NJIT coordinated work with some dozen organizations and provided transportation, food, and opportunities for lodging for the week.

design program, gave one of the keynote addresses, “The Making of a Maker,” an account of the “crooked path taken towards personal and professional fulfillment through the act of design-making.”

Don Menke, model shop coordinator at the College of Architecture and Design, provided offsite

logistic support and assistance in the preparation of materials. Kim Robledo-Diga, director for innovation and learning at the Newark Museum, coordinated the efforts of the host institution. n http://art.njit.edu

Among the noteworthy projects to win prizes at TechQuest were a cutting-edge method for detecting and monitoring glaucoma, a skin graft technology, and a medical imaging device.

PHOTO: RICKY KHARAWALA

From left to right: First place TechQuest winners Hassan Muhammad and Roa al-Abdalla* for Transpalpebral Self-Tonometer; second place for Quik Graft, Ilesha Sevak (also on the team, but not present were Matthew Armanious*, Sayali Kulkarni*, Ashas Pathan* and Evan Tyerman*); and Pitambar Dayal*, third place for CAS-Imaging.

THE QUEST FOR INNOVATION NJIT’s second annual TechQuest and Innovation Day in April showcased the wide range of innovative talent and entrepreneurial skills possessed by students across disciplines, from engineering and the life sciences to business and finance.

Among the noteworthy projects to win prizes at the event were a cutting-edge method for detecting and monitoring glaucoma, a skin graft technology, and a medical imaging device.

The TechQuest undergraduate invention competition rewards innovation among NJIT undergraduates by encouraging small interdisciplinary teams to work together to develop research ideas. The competition is sponsored by the James Stevenson Foundation, which this year gave

out a total of $14,000 in awards shared among the three topplacing teams. Three-quarters of the funds go toward summer stipends that enable team members to continue their research.

Hassan Muhammad, a senior biomedical engineering major, and Roa al-Abdalla, a senior biology major, won first place in the TechQuest competition for their innovative non-invasive method and device for detecting and measuring glaucoma. Working with their advisor, Professor of Physics Gordon Thomas, the pair developed a technology that allows patients themselves to continually monitor fluid pressure within the eye, a symptom of glaucoma, through the eyelid.

The second place winner, Quik Graft, proposes creating antibiotic-resistant, ready-toapply skin grafts within hours using a modified compact 3D

printer. The third place award went to CAS-Imaging, a device that would be incorporated into functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect 3D (lateral, axial and rotational) head movement and analyze it in real time.

Winners of the Big Data Visualization Challenge, a contest sponsored by S&P Capital IQ, a business unit of McGraw Hill Financial, Inc., were also announced at the event. The competition was designed to immerse undergraduates in the high-stakes world of mergers and acquisitions by challenging them to pitch hypothetical acquisition targets to technology company executives using cutting-edge research, analytics, and data-visualization tools available on S&P Capital IQ’s desktop platform.

Members of the winning team were Geoffrey Ching*, a junior majoring in business and finance, James Barr, a senior majoring in finance and accounting, Orest Bidnyk, a senior majoring in accounting, Pedro Santos*, a senior majoring in civil engineering, Rodolfo

Marquez*, a junior majoring in accounting and finance, and Grant Barr, a senior majoring in mathematics and finance.

The winners received iPad Air tablets, and all participating students were evaluated for the opportunity to become an S&P Capital IQ intern.

Lou Eccleston, the president of S&P Capital IQ and keynote speaker at the event, emphasized the importance of what he called a critical combination – “learning how to learn,” communications skills, and discipline – in maintaining the “sustained competitive innovation” necessary to prevail in today’s technologyrich global marketplace.

More than 40 students presented their research, inventions and business concepts as part of Innovation Day. They represented the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, the Undergraduate Research and Innovation program, the Student Innovation Acceleration Club, the Undergraduate Biophysics Program, and the Interdisciplinary Design Studio. n *Dorman honors scholars

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A customizable device would monitor responsiveness, assess cognition and adapt future learning sessions. It could take the form of a familiar toy, such as a stuffed animal or robot.

TO HELP CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

THE GAME IS ON

NJIT and WebTeam Corporation recently signed an agreement to collaboratively produce a learning device to help children with autism spectrum disorder master skill-building lessons via sensors and software embedded in the device. An NJIT team, including students, will work with New Jersey-based WebTeam to design and develop the tactile-friendly device, which will interface with the company’s iLearnNEarn2 program, part of the ColorsKit package for autism management.

The customizable device would prompt a child through the lessons, monitor responsiveness, assess cognition and adapt future learning sessions accordingly.

The device could take the form of a familiar toy, such as a stuffed animal or robot. The educational sessions will be based on a curriculum developed by Eden Autism Services, a non-profit organization that provides education and training for people with autism, as well as for their families, teachers and caregivers.

WebTeam chose to partner with NJIT because the university is “a technology leader with the best engineers in the region,” says Nish Parikh, WebTeam’s chief 6

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A learning device created by NJIT students to help autistic children will be developed as an educational aid with a greater range of capabilities through the university’s partnership with WebTeam Corporation and Eden Autism Services.

executive officer. “We want to provide an educational tool that parents with little teaching experience can use, bringing them together on the same platform with teachers and therapists,” he adds.

“The ultimate goal is to improve the quality of life for individuals on the autism spectrum and to reduce stress on them and their families. We want to make learning both smart and fun.”

“WebTeam has developed the program and we will optimize

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NJIT has been named one of the top 25 schools on The Princeton Review’s recently published list saluting those with the best undergraduate programs in video game design. The schools were selected after a survey of 150 programs at institutions offering game design coursework and/or degrees in the United States, Canada, and a number of other countries.

“We are honored that The Princeton Review has chosen NJIT as one of the top 25 universities for game design in 2014,” says Marc Sequeira, university lecturer and coordinator of game development for the Information Technology Program in NJIT’s College of Computing Sciences.

“NJIT’s gaming programs engage a vibrant community of

its interface, as well as assessment, feedback and response capabilities,” says Atam Dhawan, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, who will lead the NJIT team. As part of the intellectual property agreement, NJIT is jointly filing a patent supplemental to the patent WebTeam filed on its educational software.

NJIT students have been working on a learning device for children with autism since 2011, when Honors College students from the university’s Interdisciplinary Design Studio (IDS) created an educational toy for engaging children who might lose focus or interest staring at a computer screen and for assessing their cognitive abilities.

designers and developers, artists and programmers, scientists and industry partners. Our course offerings reflect an emphasis on strong, individual skill sets as well as interdisciplinary, team-based projects. And our students graduate with strong practical skills, developed in hands-on laboratory and studio environments.”

NJIT offers two degree programs in game design: The Bachelor of Science in Information Technology and the Bachelor of Arts in Digital Design. n

http://ccs.njit.edu http://art.njit.edu

Parikh, a member of the IDS External Advisory Board, was one of the sponsors whose support enabled the team to pursue research and development on the NJIT campus.

Dhawan says that the new project will build on the IDS team’s technology, which could respond in simple ways to the children’s choices, such as telling them whether they had correctly picked the color the program prompted.

The next stage of the project will incorporate more sophisticated responses, including the intelligence to recognize whether a task is taking a child too long and the ability to respond by moving on to the next task, so the child does not become frustrated. n

NJIT athletes are as academically accomplished as they are physically fit.

END NOTES Michel Boufadel, professor in

the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Center for Natural Resources Development and Protection, has been elected a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Membership as a Fellow recognizes exceptional professional accomplishments and is an honor accorded less than four percent of ASCE members.

Atam Dhawan, distinguished

professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering for his significant contributions in the field of medical imaging. Dhawan, who serves as executive director of undergraduate research and innovation at NJIT, is also a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Bernadette Longo, associate

professor in the Department of Humanities, is the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Professional Communication Society’s Emily K. Schlesinger Award for outstanding service to the society. Longo also recently co-wrote a chapter in Solving Problems in Technical Communication, which won the 2014 Best Original Collection of Essays in Technical Communication Award from the National Council of Teachers of English.

Horacio G. Rotstein, associate professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, along with Tasso Kaper and Mark Kramer of Boston University, recently served as guest editors of a special journal issue focused on rhythms in neurological disease.

“Rhythms and Dynamic Transitions in Neurological Disease Modeling, Computation and Experiment,” which appeared in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, provided diverse perspectives assessing rhythmic neural activity in healthy and diseased brains, research central to understanding and treating disorders such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and migraine.

POINT BY POINT

www.njithighlanders.com

ACADEMICALLY OUTSTANDING NJIT athletes are as academically accomplished as they are physically fit. Recently, the Men’s Swimming and Diving Team received the Team Scholar All-America Award from the College Swimming Coaches Association of America. The award is given to teams that have collectively achieved a GPA of 3.0 or higher.

Laurent Simon, associate profes-

sor of chemical engineering, has received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Society for Engineering Education. At NJIT, he has been recognized with an Excellence in Teaching Award (2007), Master Teacher Award (2009), and the Saul K. Fenster Innovation in Engineering Education Award.

In addition, eight NJIT scholarathletes received Coastal Collegiate Swimming Association All-Conference Academic Awards, which set a university record. To receive that award, a swimmer must have achieved a GPA of 3.5 or higher and competed at the 2014 Coastal Collegiate Swimming Association Championships.

The Highlanders receiving the award include freshman Anthony Czar (mathematical sciences)*, freshman Joe Pedo (computer engineering)*, freshman Michael Sungurov (business/ finance), sophomore Matthew Temple (chemical engineering)*, sophomore David

Schmidt (web and information systems), junior Gene Tutzauer (electrical engineering), senior Christian Barnard (business/ marketing), and senior Victor Razuk (chemical engineering)*.

“NJIT is a nationally-ranked university with demanding majors and really smart students,” says Leonard Kaplan, director of athletics. “The Men’s Swimming and Diving Team is a perfect example. They had a great season, winning conference awards and being named Team Scholar All-Americans. That’s quite an achievement.” n *Dorman honors scholars

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A NEW HAND AT THE COMPUTING HELM

RESEARCHER AND EDUCATOR MAREK RUSINKIEWICZ “Perhaps it was destiny,” says Marek Rusinkiewicz of the career path that brought him to NJIT in 2013 as dean of the College of Computing Sciences.

“That is, if you believe in such a thing,” he adds with a note of quiet humor before speaking more seriously about why he wanted to return to the academic world after two decades in industry. “I missed the intellectual energy that you can find in academia, exploring new ideas with colleagues, the contact with students who will be shaping the future in computing and many other areas.”

PHOTO: JED MEDINA

But academia is hardly unfamiliar territory for Rusinkiewicz. It’s where he began a distinguished career in the United States after coming to this country as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in 1980 with a doctorate in informatics from the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Researching database management at the University of Michigan was the starting point for accomplishments that encompass leading-edge technological innovation and corporate leadership. His career also encompasses international engagement with groups such as the International Foundation on Cooperative Information Systems, service on the Technical Advisory Group of the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and numerous publications in areas that include distributed computing and workflow management.

From the University of Michigan, Rusinkiewicz moved on to the University of Houston. “I spent about 15 years going through the customary stages of an academic career – associate professor of computer science, tenure, professor, department chair.

The next logical step would have been an administrative position, but that didn’t seem attractive to me at the time.”

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“ THE MORE I EXPLORED THIS OPPORTUNITY, THE MORE I WAS INTRIGUED BY WHAT WAS GOING ON AT THE SCHOOL. I WAS IMPRESSED

BY THE QUALITY OF RESEARCH AND THE EVEN GREATER POTENTIAL I SEE FOR THE FUTURE.” An opportunity that did attract Rusinkiewicz was an offer of work with the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas, where he eventually became vice president for information technology research. Created in 1984 by the National Cooperative Research Act, MCC was a consortium of electronics and computing companies exempted from anti-trust laws in order to perform precompetitive research aimed at thwarting the perceived threat of Japanese dominance in the computer field.

SOMETHING CALLED THE “INTERNET” At MCC, Rusinkiewicz was vice president for information technology research, leading initiatives in information management that included pioneering development of search engines for something called the “Internet.”

“But nearly all of MCC’s owners viewed this Internet thing as an interesting novelty that had little to offer commercially,” Rusinkiewicz wryly comments.

One member of the MCC consortium, however, did see a brighter future for the nascent World Wide Web. It was Bell Communications Research – Bellcore – the research organization collectively created by the regional telephone companies in the wake of the 1984 breakup of AT&T. This vote of confidence did not come at an opportune time, though. When the feared Japanese cyber-hegemony failed to materialize, the owners of MCC decided that collaborating in research and sharing intellectual property was not the best economic course for them.

Going forward in the emerging computerbased world, the new model would be to create start-ups in which the owners would have an equity position – a model that they could not get to work as expected. “As MCC unraveled, the technical talent, including myself, started to receive offers of employment from the member companies,” Rusinkiewicz says. “You might say we put ourselves up for auction,” he adds, smiling.

The offer that most appealed to him came from Bellcore. He wouldn’t have to relocate

from Austin, and he would be the head of a new applied research center. At Bellcore, subsequently renamed Telcordia Technologies, Rusinkiewicz helped to lead the regional communications providers that were the owners in introducing new landline and wireless services, and transforming the technology underpinning those services through computer automation.

Even as late as the 1990s, for example, Rusinkiewicz explains that provisioning a high-speed T1 line – all the steps required to provide that service – was substantially manual. “It could take a week or two. We found a way to do it in about 15 seconds, completely automatically. It was quite a revolution.”

FINDING AND CONNECTING THE DOTS Rusinkiewicz did eventually leave Texas, when he was asked to head Telcordia’s computer science laboratory in New Jersey. It was there that he became a senior vice president and general manager of applied research for the organization.

The initial downside was that the move coincided with the bursting of the “dot com” bubble and the 2000 stock market crash.

Bellcore’s owners decided that they were no longer enthusiastic about funding collaborative research and the budget for such work began to dwindle.

In response, Rusinkiewicz says, “We had two choices. One was to ride quietly into the sunset and the other was to look for other sources of funding. Who has money? The government. And who in the government?

The Department of Defense.”

The expertise that Telcordia offered did secure major Department of Defense contracts, as well as contracts from federal intelligence groups. When asked about this work, Rusinkiewicz responds, “It involved information retrieval and information analysis. Finding the dots and connecting the dots.

Maybe that’s all I should say.

“But we did work on things like latent semantic indexing, the foundation for information retrieval, and multi-lingual

retrieval. We helped to make it possible to ask a question in English and get the answer in, say, Pashto or Urdu.”

Under Rusinkiewicz’s leadership, Telcordia’s research organization evolved from an overhead cost center into a profitable business unit, with the value of its government contracts growing by two orders of magnitude by the time Ericsson completed the acquisition of Telcordia in 2012. In addition to their government projects, Telcordia researchers assisted communications companies worldwide in areas that included software engineering, network management, information processing, and information and network security.

FILLING A VOID Ericsson’s acquisition of Telcordia brought Rusinkiewicz to another decision point in his life, with a major factor being foreign ownership by Ericsson. This significantly complicated further work by Telcordia for the federal government. It was the turn of corporate events that motivated him to consider returning to academia.

“When I left the university for industry, I thought I would never return, but I found that I did miss it,” he reflects. “There are unique challenges, and special satisfaction. I felt that I had also gained a perspective on computing technology and research that could be of some reasonable value in the university world.”

While Rusinkiewicz did have opportunities to join NJIT in the past, personal circumstances continued to lead him in a different direction. But as he has said, destiny may have prevailed in 2013.

Of accepting his current position at NJIT, Rusinkiewicz says, “The more I explored this opportunity, the more I was intrigued by what was going on at the school. I was impressed by the quality of research and the even greater potential I see for the future.” He goes on to say that NJIT’s location in Newark is a key part of this potential, through proximity to many industries that have a pressing need for innovation in computing and for skilled employees who can translate innovation into workplace reality.

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OPEN, CREATIVE, FLEXIBLE Companies like Google, Intel and Microsoft do fund internal research, but it is often narrowly focused and very marketdriven, Rusinkiewicz says. The big ideas that drive scientific and economic progress must come from elsewhere, and a promising model is the university community collaborating with industry and government.

This model is widely accepted in Asia and Europe, and in Rusinkiewicz’s estimation it has put other nations on the path to matching and even superseding American preeminence in technological innovation.

In addition to allocating enough money, Rusinkiewicz sees the necessity of adjusting the way this country’s stakeholders in research interact. Universities in the United States are forming research consortia to leverage diverse intellectual and financial resources. However, maximizing chances of success may require a less proprietary attitude regarding intellectual property on the part of a school, and greater willingness to share the financial potential of innovation with partners in industry.

Government also has a significant role to play, a role that must be acknowledged by all concerned – including government.

“We must be open to new ideas when it comes to alternative models for cooperation in research,” Rusinkiewicz says. “We need to be creative and flexible.”

TWO KEY DIRECTIONS Whatever model energizes progress in computing, the field is evolving in two key directions according to Rusinkiewicz. One 10

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is the use of increasingly powerful computers to process massive amounts of data and harvest new scientific and social knowledge that could be applied to improving the quality of life. The other is to put ever greater computing power into more and smaller devices, down to nanoscale therapeutic robots that could travel within the human body to cure disease.

Rusinkiewicz speaks enthusiastically about this potential, and the ubiquitous presence of computing technology around us, as reasons to study computing, especially at NJIT. “There is no research without computing, in any field, from biology and finance to sociology and astronomy.

It is absolutely central. Computational science has created a new paradigm through which all scientific disciplines ask fundamental questions about the world.

“Computing has also dramatically increased productivity in commerce, industry and management. It is the foundation of our infrastructure for telecommunications, energy, transportation, banking.

The world’s computer networks are the nervous system of society.”

Rusinkiewicz goes on to say that “More and more, we live in cyberspace. We work in cyberspace, we learn in cyberspace, we socialize in cyberspace, we entertain ourselves in cyberspace. A career in computing, or learning how computing is important in any major, puts you at the forefront of life in the 21st century.”

The advantages of studying computing at NJIT are substantial in Rusinkiewicz’s view.

They include a distinctive interdisciplinary and hands-on approach. But he says that there is another particularly significant aspect.

“I feel strongly that our students really value the cultural diversity they experience at NJIT. They value being able to share many different perspectives while working toward their educational goals, and working on projects together. Regardless of background, I see our students helping each other. They care about each other.” n

THE COMPUTING FRONTIER

Today, Rusinkiewicz also asserts, NJIT and comparable schools can fill part of a void left by the virtual disappearance of institutions such as Bell Telephone Laboratories, where AT&T supported research that produced technological sea changes stemming from the transistor, the laser and many other breakthroughs. “The parking lots have emptied and the lights have been turned off at institutions that did a lot of basic research.”

RECOGNIZING FACES, VERIFYING REALITY, ASSESSING CORPORATE SINCERITY It took nearly 40 years to apprehend James Robert Jones, a convicted murderer who escaped from the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in 1977 and lived for decades under a new name in Florida. But thanks to 21st-century computer-based face recognition, Jones was arrested in March when an automated comparison of the former soldier’s service photo with his current Florida driver’s license confirmed his true identity for cold-case investigators.

This is technology that Chengjun Liu, associate professor of computer science, is taking to new levels of capability at NJIT. It’s technology that, as Liu says, could greatly enhance security in many ways. In addition to serving law enforcement, promising applications include making credit-card transactions more secure and providing a better alternative to passwords for the array of electronic communication devices proliferating in daily life.

One day, face-recognition algorithms may literally open doors for us — at home, at work, and even as we approach our cars.

Liu explains that there are many challenges to be overcome in the further development of computer-based face recognition, among them identifying individuals at different angles and under various lighting conditions. However, Liu and colleagues in the field are making progress, even to the point where an algorithm he helped to develop at NJIT proved better than human judgment in deciding if two different photos showed the same person. What’s more, the NJIT algorithm performed better than 12 others tested in the Face Recognition Grand Challenge held under the auspices of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The importance and power of computing are evident in every discipline at NJIT, and Liu is among many NJIT researchers developing innovative uses for this indispensable resource.

VERIFYING DIGITAL REALITY How can we know if a digital photograph has been manipulated so that it no longer mirrors the real world, and how can all forms of digital media be protected from illegal alteration and copying? Professor of Computer Science Frank Shih knows.

Shih’s expertise encompasses digital watermarking, steganography and forensics, topics covered in four books he has published and numerous journal articles.

He has improved algorithms for digital watermarking that can guarantee the authenticity of digital content and determine whether it has been altered since insertion of the watermark. In the multimedia world, signal information comprising a digital watermark can authenticate pictures, video, audio and text.

Shih also is a foe of “copy-move” forgery, in which part of an image is copied and superimposed on another area to hide something, perhaps to remove a person from sight. Since the copied superimposition will have the same digital properties as the rest of the image, Shih emphasizes that the alteration is especially difficult to detect. However, a new algorithm that he has developed makes it easier to determine where such changes have been made, and to reveal the digital truth.

Steganography, a word derived from ancient Greek, means “covered” or “concealed” writing. In the 21st century, it describes adding information to digital media that is accessible only with the right algorithmic key. Shih’s research has focused on both encoding steganographic information in media and keeping such information highly secure.

COMPUTING AND CORPORATE CONFIDENCE Each quarter, executives at publicly traded companies speak with financial analysts and journalists about the performance of their companies, a verbal complement to what they report in writing. It’s communication that can have a pronounced influence on the price of a company’s stock and an organization’s overall fiscal well-being.

There are various objective ways to analyze the facts and figures released. But subjective assessment of what members of management say in public also factors into trading decisions. Having a tool to evaluate the nuances of what they say more objectively would clearly be useful for the financial community. James Cicon, assistant professor of finance at NJIT, is helping to provide such a tool, as well as other computer-based analytical insights.

The computing power that today is ubiquitous and inexpensive is fundamental to Cicon’s research, including recent projects to enhance objective evaluation of a company’s financial prospects and governance. For one project, Cicon is working with Professor Ali Akansu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. They are correlating the facial expressions of executives making positive statements about their organizations in YouTube videos with subsequent real-world corporate performance.

Cicon says that being able to assess an executive’s confidence in, for example, a proposed merger matters in finance. It is one more piece of knowledge that can be used for making an informed decision about the potential of a company’s stock. The NJIT researchers’ goal is to develop an algorithmic tool based on expression analysis that will graph executive confidence and provide additional input for trading strategies.

Another project involves examining transcripts of companies’ quarterly conference calls with analysts for significant changes between management’s prepared statements and answers to the analysts’ questions — their cross-examination, so to speak. Quantifying the information content of the prepared statements relative to how management responds to questioning also enriches the store of data available for evaluating a company.

By analyzing some 300,000 conference calls downloaded from the Internet, Cicon has found that top management is often more forthcoming when questioned aggressively. However, he also has noted a tendency for management to reduce the amount of information offered when questioned about complex profit-and-loss issues, possibly due to concern for market reaction and how the company’s position might be perceived by its own lower-level managers. And as he reports in an award-winning article prepared for the Journal of Financial Research, the degree of certainty and optimism discerned in published earnings forecasts correlates strongly with subsequent stock performance.

These analyses would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, without the Internet. Cicon also says that he was able to complete his conference-call analysis in about a month on a relatively modest budget, something that definitely would not have been possible without the computing power now at nearly everyone’s disposal.

Cicon offers an important caveat, however. Tools like facial-expression analysis can be used properly or improperly. Their appropriate and effective use requires education to understand both their limitations and capabilities. Otherwise, the result will just be noise.

A feature about cloud computing follows in this issue, and look for more about the work of NJIT researchers on the computing frontier in future issues.

College of Computing Sciences: http://ccs.njit.edu School of Management: http://management.njit.edu

Author: Dean L. Maskevich is editor of NJIT Magazine.

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COMPUTING AND THE

CLOUD The computing cloud continues to envelop daily life, from the way we do business at every level to how we entertain ourselves with videos, music, books and games.

Why should companies, large and small, bear the expense of maintaining their own IT resources any longer? As a growing volume of advertising asserts, it’s much better to be in the cloud.

There’s also a great deal of money to be made in the cloud. Worldwide spending on public IT cloud services is expected to exceed $107 billion in 2017 and to experience a compound annual growth rate of 23.5 percent between 2013–2017, five times that of the IT industry as a whole, according to the International Data Corporation, a market intelligence firm.

Cristian Borcea likens the rise of cloud computing in the 21st century to the transformation of the country’s energy infrastructure more than a hundred years before, when home-based and local generation began to evolve into the modern grid, dominated by gigantic utilities pumping electricity to houses and offices hundreds of miles away.

“In the computing world of today, companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft are quickly becoming those utilities, leasing storage and computing services at their huge data centers,” says Borcea, associate professor and associate chair of the Department of Computer Sciences, who in 2010 offered one of the first college courses in the nation on cloud computing.

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IBM is a striking illustration of the trend.

Synonymous with the computer, the company sold its PC business to Lenovo in 2004, and earlier this year followed up by selling the Chinese technology company its Intel-based servers as well. “It’s just a service company now, and it offers private and hybrid cloud solutions to customers,” he notes.

“But a major difference between the two sectors,” Borcea adds, “is that the energy industry is highly regulated. Right now the cloud is not regulated in any way. Cloud providers are not liable for losses or breaches. The only laws that apply are general privacy laws and the only guarantees that exist on either reliability or data security are service agreements.”

DATA IN DANGER Data in the cloud can be lost, stolen or corrupted. It can be mistakenly deleted when a server is updating. Hardware can fail. Software illegally distributed through the cloud can unleash embedded viruses. Service can become unavailable during downtimes. There is no legal redress for any of these mishaps.

Under the current system, it’s the responsibility of users to back up their own data.

“Technology is always ahead of the law,” Borcea says, adding, however, that he expects the federal government to develop regulations over the next several years to protect the growing stream of data and computation migrating to the cloud. In the meantime, he and other NJIT colleagues are devising ways to bring transparency, accountability, and improvements in functionality to a system in transition.

Reza Curtmola, an associate professor of computer science, won a five-year “CAREER” award from the National Science Foundation in 2011 to devise methods for assessing the security of data storage through a remote testing mechanism he has developed.

“When people store data in the cloud they effectively lose control over it, while current storage models require them to trust cloud service providers,” he says. “You cannot sue if you lose data. Even though cloud storage

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“ Even though cloud storage systems are designed to offer high availability and reliability, outages and data loss incidents are still possible due to software and hardware malfunction, natural disasters, or malicious attacks.”

Reza Curtmola, associate professor of computer science

systems are designed to offer high availability and reliability, outages and data loss incidents are still possible due to software and hardware malfunction, natural disasters, or malicious attacks. This makes it difficult to assess the risk of outsourcing data and therefore unsuitable for applications that require long-term integrity and reliability.”

“What I’m trying to do,” he adds, “is to tackle the problem from a technical perspective, to come up with ways to provide additional guarantees by making sure that providers are doing what they’re expected to do.

Right now, cloud users don’t have the means to check how their data is managed and cloud service providers are not transparent about how they go about it.”

Curtmola’s assessment mechanism would allow cloud clients to check whether their data is being stored correctly and whether the provider can produce it on demand. If adopted by cloud storage providers, it would offer additional guarantees, extending the range of applications that could benefit from cloudbased storage.

“I store a set of data in the cloud and then issue a challenge to the storage server to show me that the data is still there and uncorrupted.

The goal is to detect if something goes wrong, because knowing is the important first step,” he says. “It’s important to detect early – and if you find that one part of your data is corrupted, you can take steps towards repairing.”

To restore data that has been lost or corrupted, Curtmola replaces it with healthy data stored with other providers. “Redundancy is important,” he says. “I recommend storing it in multiple places, maybe even in other clouds

at different providers. When the data is valuable, the additional cost of multiple replicas is worth it.”

But despite the system’s uncertainties, economics continues to drive business to the cloud.

WAY TOO MUCH STORAGE Cloud computing began to emerge about a decade ago as a boon to large web-based companies such as Amazon and Google who looked at their operations and realized they had “way too much storage” on most days in order to accommodate periodic surges in demand, Borcea notes.

“Websites such as CNN.com are a good analogy. If there is no big news, comparatively few people are watching. But if there is news, everybody’s watching and so it makes economic sense to overprovision,” Borcea says.

“Cloud providers, too, need to be able to prepare for the peak load, while on the average day they are nowhere near that, using maybe 10 to 15 percent of their total capacity.”

Amazon was the first web-based company to lease storage and it added computing services a year or so later. Leasing unused space made economic sense to Amazon, while its huge data centers, provisioned by hardware and Internet connections purchased at cheaper bulk rates, allowed the company to sell storage and computing at favorable rates.

“It’s a commodity – people are buying and selling as much as they need, and the price of storage is getting cheaper and cheaper as the technology advances,” notes Curtmola.

GREAT FOR START-UPS Companies operating in the cloud are essentially leasing virtual computers on demand, and they can connect to these virtual computers from their own computing infrastructure. They save money on hardware as well as system administration and receive free or cheaper services such as e-mail and software packages.

“It’s a great deal for start-ups,” Borcea says.

“If I’m a company at NJIT’s Enterprise Development Center, I may have a lot of customers

SECURITY VS. ECONOMICS Disclosures of NSA surveillance have also sent shivers through the cloud, and Google says it is now encrypting e-mail when it is in transit as a result. “It’s easier to tap into a wire than to gain access to a computer,” Curtmola says.

But even security concerns are tempered by economic realities.

“How much security does it pay to add?

Companies don’t want to make handling data slower,” Curtmola says. “Some data that is stored for safekeeping, but rarely used, can be encrypted. But if you want to search data or actually use it, it looks like gibberish and can’t be read.”

“For their part, cloud providers like Google and Amazon don’t want you to encrypt, because they data mine. That’s why services like Gmail are free. They mine it to advertise,” Curtmola says, adding with a laugh, “That’s one of the reasons why security measures proposed by the academic community are slow to be adopted.”

Xiaoning Ding, an assistant professor of

PHOTO: JED MEDINA

all of a sudden before I’ve earned much revenue. I may not be able to buy the hardware it would take to serve them so it would make sense to rent in the cloud, where you can scale up inexpensively and ultra-fast.”

Increasingly, large companies are moving at least some of their data and operations to the cloud. The New York Times was in the vanguard when the company moved its digital archive to the cloud in 2006. Scientific research is also moving to the cloud. Hedge funds run some of their computationally-intensive models there as well. Big companies distribute software through the cloud.

“This will increase. Going forward, it’s likely we’ll have our own computers mostly for private use,” Curtmola says.

For the time being, however, data sensitivity and long-term integrity still hinder broader use of the cloud and storage of more sensitive data,” he adds. “Healthcare providers would not want to store medical data in the cloud, for example, and financial companies wouldn’t put algorithms in the cloud.”

computing sciences, works on ensuring application functionality and performance in the cloud.

“If there are problems with running a program, it can be difficult to determine if it’s your program or the system from the service provider. It’s important to be able to identify the root causes,” says Ding, who studies application testing and troubleshooting with IBM and others.

“We run a program several times on a local machine and in the cloud,” he says. “By monitoring and analyzing its behavior on different systems, we can identify functionality problems and reveal many insights about the root causes.”

Ding also researches ways to improve the speed of applications and programs in the cloud by using multi-core processors.

“Some programs may be slowed down by more than ten times in the cloud,” he says. “We want to make sure the cloud provides high performance for every program in it. We’re working on designing a better infrastructure with researchers at Intel Labs, so programs will perform better. The main idea is to allocate computing resources in the cloud to programs in a way that better fits their real demand.”

But as they try to make the cloud a more secure and high-functioning environment,

Associate Professor Reza Curtmola (right) is among the NJIT researchers working to make the cloud safer data-storage territory. In 2013, a paper co-authored with doctoral candidate Bo Chen, proposing better ways to ensure the integrity of data entrusted to cloud-service providers, received the Outstanding Paper Award from the Third Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery.

NJIT researchers will also seek to exploit its current potential.

Borcea, who will be teaching a new graduate-level course on mobile cloud computing, is working on mobile phone technology that will leverage the cloud as an energy- and storagesaving platform.

“The main limitation of a mobile phone is battery capacity, but we can use the cloud to back up data and run apps. What I’m working on is an avatar, which is a software surrogate of the phone that would live in the cloud and would synchronize with the phone.

A program that needed a lot of energy to run would operate in the cloud and it would perform faster.” n http://ccs.njit.edu Author: Tracey Regan is an NJIT Magazine contributing writer.

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ALUMNI CIRCUIT

The view from Bob and Beverly McEntee’s apartment at Bondi Beach.

REPORTING FROM DOWN UNDER Bob McEntee (CE ’62) couldn’t resist sharing the following account of the enviable experience that began as he and his wife, Beverly (St. Michael’s RN ’61), celebrated a very special occasion.

Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia 2/5–3/13/2014 A chance encounter with a couple from Australia on the cruise that Beverly and I took to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary in 2012 led to a vacation experience of a lifetime. Who would have thought that this friendship that developed on the cruise would evolve into a fiveweek stay at a beach-front apartment on world-famous Bondi Beach? But it did, and when Cedric and Angela suggested that we “house sit” an apartment for their friend on Bondi Beach for minimal maintenance costs, it did not take an engineering or nursing degree to conclude this was a no-brainer.

So on February 5 we took 16

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the 20-hour flight to Sydney in the land of Oz. Since I’ve been inclined to be a beach bum all my life, living on a beach with world-class views from the apartment made a really memorable experience. Don’t forget, this was Australia at the end of their summer with temps in the 80’s and water temps in the 70’s, perfect for a New Jersey getaway where the winter snow storms were setting new records.

We found the people in Australia to be extremely friendly and outgoing. Having a host family in Sydney was a true blessing as we were able to visit many sites that most tourists may never see. The highlight was the trip to the Blue Mountain range with spectacular views of their “Three Sisters” from Echo Point.

On days when the weather did not cooperate, we toured the surrounding suburbs and downtown Sydney. Sydney is a very cosmopolitan city with a beautifully developed harbor area, much more so than its sister city, San Francisco. On

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our tour through the famed opera house we were treated to a practice performance by the Sydney Symphonic Orchestra in their main theater, which gave us an appreciation of the acoustical design of that famous “sea shell” structure. We also learned there are five separate and distinct theater halls within the structure, which allows them to hold multiple events simultaneously.

Sydney-siders, as they are known, and Australians in general, are blessed with an extensive and efficient public transportation system, including trains, buses and ferries. One does not need, nor want, a car to commute throughout Sydney. Timetables and maps for all routes are conveniently located on their website, and bus timetables are shown at all major stops. Express buses to and from the Circular Quay, Sydney’s downtown harbor, stopped directly in front of our apartment. Our Sundays were devoted to a ferry ride to Manly Beach, where we would meet our host family for a homecooked meal and some of their excellent Australian wine.

I joined a local fitness facility that appeared to be the Gold’s Gym of Bondi Beach. I found most of the young Australians to be extremely fit, but they also love their beer. Sunday mornings on the beaches are overtaken by hundreds of young children between six and ten years of age competing in sand and ocean races. Simultaneously, age group competition for one and two km open-ocean swimming races is held for adults, something akin to the open-road races we are more familiar with in the States.

I took advantage of the spectacular coastal walkway between Bondi Beach and Bronte Beach for my morning runs. Google that site for some outstanding photos.

For those of you contemplating a visit to the Land Down Under, just know that it is very expensive.

We found that most of the staples are about twice what the cost is in the States. One positive outcome is that Bev, who is so coupon conscious, has vowed to never again complain about the food prices back home. But what do they say. . .. never say never.

Cheers mate, Bob and Bev

Beverly and Bob McEntee at Australia’s Blue Mountains.

A MAGNETIC HONOR “Thanks to Arthur Hahn, we’re all pretty spoiled when we go shopping at physical retailers.

The card swipe that today takes literally nanoseconds is made possible because of something that Arthur and his small team of engineers at IBM did to incorporate a coded mag stripe on the back of a plastic (or paper) card.

Until then, credit cards were plastic but they had nothing with which to encode data that could be used to authenticate a user or a transaction and to streamline the check-out process.”

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! Do you have news about your career, your family, an avocation? Share it in a class note for NJIT Magazine.

And be sure to let us know if you have a new address.

On the Web, use the form at www.njit.edu/alumni/classnotes.

By e-mail, send news and photos with your graduation year(s) to alumni-classnotes@njit.edu.

Arthur Hahn

This is the commendation accorded Hahn, an electrical engineer who graduated in 1969 from Newark College of Engineering, upon his recent induction into the Payments Hall of Fame™ as inventor of the now-ubiquitous magnetic stripe.

The Payments Hall of Fame has been established as part of the Innovation Project sponsored

by PYMNTS.com to honor the men and women who created the foundation of the payments industry and who have led the way for continuing innovation.

PYMNTS.com is the leading B2B venue where companies in payments share information about the initiatives that are shaping the future of commerce.

In the early 1970s, the group that Hahn headed at IBM was charged with finding a practical way to incorporate a magnetic stripe on plastic and paper cards using the “bar code” that the company had developed. As Hahn relates, “IBM understood the potential of the technology, and we had the assignment of determining the best method for putting that magnetic stripe on plastic and paper cards and designing a fully automated

production line.” Hahn also had a key role in convincing the National Retail Merchants Association to adopt their magnetic bar code as a standard that would transform shopping and other daily activities.

Yet this is not the only highlight of Hahn’s career. He contributed to pioneering research in wireless communications and later launched a company that made a major change in the way electricity is metered.

In 2010, Hahn received an NJIT Alumni Achievement Award for his diverse accomplishments.

Read more in the Alumni Circuit section of the fall 2010 issue at http://magazine.njit.edu.

Via U.S. mail to:

Alumni Relations, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Eberhardt Hall NJIT Alumni Center, Room 218, 323 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd., Newark, NJ 07102-1982

SBA RECOGNITION FOR KIRAN GILL The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has named Kiran Gill EMBA ’07, who is the owner, president and CEO of PARS Environmental, Inc., New Jersey’s Small Business Person of the Year for 2014. Recently, Gill also was included among NJBIZ’s “Best 50 Women in Business.” In 2013, she was on the NJBIZ “40 Under 40” list, which recognizes 40 New Jersey professionals under the age of 40 for their success in business.

A profile of Gill appeared in the Alumni Circuit section of the winter 2014 issue, online at http://magazine.njit.edu.

CONCRETE ACCOMPLISHMENT Narguis Benyamin graduated in 2013 with a dual degree in construction management technology and concrete industry management. Her final semester was spent in a co-op position at the Creter Vault Corporation (CVC) and its affiliated companies in Flemington, New Jersey, where she gained firsthand – and hands-on – experience in the concrete industry.

Benyamin was also a summer intern at the CVC affiliate Concrete Lumber Manufacturing Group-NJ, LLC. She was a quality-control technician on a research-and-development team working with a prestressed, light-weight concrete product with characteristics of actual lumber in form and function.

Benyamin’s internship and co-op experiences led to a full-time position after graduation as an assistant quality-control manager with CVC.

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CLASS NOTES MAL & FRIENDS NJIT Magazine invites new correspondents to join Mal Simon in sharing news about class members and alumni organizations.

Professor emeritus of physical education and athletics, Mal was director of physical education and athletics, and men’s soccer coach, for 30 years. In 1993, he received the Cullimore Medal for his service to the university.

If you would like to be a regular correspondent, don’t hesitate to send an e-mail to the editor of NJIT Magazine: dean.maskevich@njit.edu

First, the latest news from Mal — Boca Grande 2014 It is hard to believe that more than a quarter century has passed since Diane and I met with Fabian Hurtado ’75 and Joe Dias ’85 and their wives at the Hurtado home in Lake Mary, Florida, and decided to start an annual reunion for alumni who played soccer at NJIT/NCE. The first reunion was held on Valentine’s Day, 2000 in Heathrow, Florida. I remember like it was yesterday that Fabian presented each wife with a rose and said, “We engineers are ugly but we are smart and marry beautiful wives.”

The annual NJIT Florida soccer alumni reunion has grown in popularity as evidenced by a record turnout of alumni and guests for the 15th reunion in Boca Grande, Florida, February 28 – March 2, 2014, hosted

by Ed ’63 and Sharon Cruz and superbly coordinated by Fabian and Jeanie Hurtado. Joining those mentioned above were Alumni Executive Director Bob Boynton, Joe ’80 and Carol Caiola, Luis Clement ’78 and his son, Malcom, Jim ’63 and Beanie Cudahy, Vice President Chuck Dees and Patricia Kuchon, Cesar ’77 and Griselda Gavidia, Andy ’63 and Barbara Handwerker, Athletics Director Len Kaplan, 18

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Alex ’63 and Irene Khowaylo, Henry Krauss ’54 and Betty

Wallace, Director of Donor Engagement Darlene Lamourt, Bernie ’49 and Bev Lubetkin, James ’73 and Marcia Moreno, Vincent ’62 and Lenda Naimoli and Lenda’s sister, Glenda, Head Soccer Coach Didier Orellana, Carlos ’82 and Donna Restrepo and their children, Rachel and Alexander, Tulia Rios ’94 and her son, David, and Anita Rubino ’83.

A highlight of the reunion for me was having Luis and Malcom Clement come from Colombia for the occasion, as Luis had honored me by naming his son Malcom.

When Malcom was nine years old, he spent a summer with Diane and me. Now 21, Malcom will graduate with honors in chemical engineering from the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, in 2015. He hopes to work as an intern this summer with a company in the United States.

Diane Simon, Malcom Clement, moi, and Luis Clement.

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Celebrating 15 years of soccer alumni reunions: (standing, left to right) Ed Cruz, David (son of Tulia Ramos), Bob Boynton, Hank Krauss, Joe Dias, James Moreno, Jim Cudahy, moi, Malcom Clement (son of Luis Clement and my namesake); (front row, left to right) Didier Orellana, Alexander, (son of Carlos Restrepo), Carlos Restrepo, Luis Clement, Fabian Hurtado, Cesar Gavidia, Len Kaplan.

Luis’s wife, Maria Fernanda, is an MD in general medicine. Luis and Maria, who live in Cali, also have a daughter, Valeria, who is majoring in industrial engineering at the same university.

Luis came to the United States from Colombia in 1971 and enrolled at Essex County College, where he played soccer and was the team’s highest scorer. He transferred to NJIT in 1975 and made his presence on the soccer field known immediately as a fast and tricky forward. After earning a bachelor’s in engineering technology, he worked at Weston Instruments in Newark as a quality control engineer from 1978 to 1979, returning to Colombia when his father passed away.

Once back in Colombia, Luis worked for 10 years as a sales field engineer for three different companies: a Swiss-Colombian company named Walter Rothlisberger selling electric power measuring devices, Baxter Labs as a quality control engineer, and Microcom Corporation, a computer company. He followed this up by

working in Italy doing marketing research for a local branch of the car-service-products company Goodyear. After three months, he returned to Colombia and opened a sales office in Bogota for the same company.

Two years later, Luis teamed up with NJIT soccer teammate Alfonso Cardenas ’80 in a water- and waste-treatment venture. Alfonso was project director for design and construction of the local waste-water treatment plant.

In 2002, Luis began a career change as a technical translator and English instructor at Icesi and Autonoma, universities in Cali. At the same time, he launched a startup in electronic waste with his brother, a chemical engineer. But he decided that his true passion was teaching, and in 2008 founded a private language school, World English Language Center (www. worldenglish.edu.co). Luis’ school now has 150 students and he is moving forward with his dream of developing a school specializing in conversational English and English for specific purposes.

Two regulars at the reunions are Alvaro J. Piedrahita ’73, PE, and James Moreno ’73, PE. Alvaro is CEO and President of T.Y. Lin International, a full-service engineering consulting firm with more than 800 employees in the U.S., including a number of NJIT/ NCE alumni, and 2,000 employees abroad, primarily in Southeast Asia. T.Y. Lin is recognized worldwide for its bridge-design capability and has designed “signature” bridges such as the Hoover Dam Bridge and the recently opened Oakland Bay Bridge. However, bridges are only about 20 percent of the company’s business, and it is a major surface-transportation player in highways, aviation transit and railroads. Current projects include transit systems in Peru, Uruguay and Panama.

James, who played on the same NJIT soccer teams for four years with Alvaro, is senior vice president at T.Y. Lin and director of the company’s southern region, with offices and 200 employees in Florida and Georgia. James’ first job was with the New York City Transit Authority, but he soon moved to the Dade County area of Florida as project manager for the Metromover system, the first fully automated urban transit system in the U.S. He then moved to Parsons Brinckerhoff, where he served as area manager for coastal Florida until his move to T.Y. Lin in 2009.

I had not heard from Joe Junguzza ’64 in 50 years, so I was surprised but pleased to get an e-mail from him reminding me of his days as a “gym rat” at NCE. He had tried out for the basketball team but didn’t make the squad. Not disheartened, he spent his free time shooting

baskets and occasionally scrimmaging against the team. He kept up his love for basketball, playing competitively until he was 65 years old when it took prostate cancer and a stroke to stop him. But he still enjoys shooting on goal.

Joe started his career as an industrial engineer for Johnson and Johnson. While at J & J, he went into line supervision in the Distribution Center, became manager of industrial engineering, and ended his employment with the company as chief industrial engineer for J&J’s Eastern facility. In 1978, he was hired as chief industrial engineer at the Polaroid Corporation. He moved into program management, where he worked to move new products from inception to commercialization. In that position, he won an international award for the microscope camera.

He was heading up digital imaging as senior director when Polaroid went bankrupt.

Joe then went to Japan to study Total Quality Management at Tsukuba University with Professor Shoji Shiba, recognized worldwide as an expert in TQM. After 9/11, he went to work for the U.S. government to help create the Transportation Security Administration, now part of Homeland Security.

He retired in 2012 and moved to Long Beach Island in New Jersey.

One never knows when you will run into an alumnus. All you have to do is wear something with NJIT on it. I was wearing an NJIT soccer t-shirt in a Wachovia Bank in St. Pete Beach, Florida, when I heard the familiar words “Did you go to NJIT?” I looked up and saw a smiling face so I started chatting with Dave MacMillan ’69.

After serving in the Marine Corps, Dave came to NCE, where he graduated summa cum laude at the top of his mechanical engineering class. While at NCE, he was inducted into the Tau Beta Pi and Phi Tau Sigma honor societies, was a member of Delta Theta Epsilon fraternity, and active in IFC and recreational sports. He began his professional career with Exxon at its engineering headquarters in Florham Park, New Jersey, and subsequently worked domestically and abroad on major projects.

Work outside the U.S. took him to locations that included Italy, Belgium, Holland, England, Singapore, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Malaysia, Australia and Thailand.

Promoted to an executive level, he had various assignments in Exxon Central Services.

1972

Dave took early retirement at 55 after 30 enjoyable years with Exxon. He says that NCE gave him skills for employment and advancement in a first-class corporation where he met and made friends with many people from different cultures. He is spending retirement in St. Pete Beach with his wife, Rosemary.

Lieutenant General Ellen Pawlikowski (ChE) has been

For those who like to plan ahead, the annual “Feet and Hands” Golf Outing will be held on Tuesday, August 5 at the Newton County Club hosted by Bob Welgos ’62.

Also, sites have been set for the 2015 and 2016 Annual Florida Soccer Alumni reunions. The 2015 reunion will be in the Palm City area hosted by Joe Dias, Joe Alves ’77, Cesar Gavidia and Hank Krauss, and the 2016 reunion will be in Coral Springs hosted by Hernan “Chico” Borja and Carlos Restrepo.

Keep the news coming to mjs@njit.edu.

Drew S. McCaskey (CE) writes,

“I have been employed for 16 years in marketing and I am the Web manager at the Delaware Transit Corporation (DTC), which operates the public transit bus and train services in the State of Delaware. I am also the Delaware state coordinator for Operation Lifesaver, the national organization that promotes highway railroad-crossing safety. In 2010, I was certified as Christ Servant Minister in the United Methodist Church, and have my own ministry at http:// csmservingothersministry.com, to serve others in our nation and around the world.”

1978 elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Pawlikowski is the commander, Space and Missile Systems Center, Air Force Space Command, Los Angeles Air Force Base. She is responsible for more than 5,000 employees nationwide and an annual budget of $10 billion. As the Air Force program executive officer for space, she manages research, design, development, acquisition and sustainment of satellites and associated command and control systems.

1979 Robert Cozzarelli (Arch.) is the regional director of the New Jersey Chapter and Region of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He is a principal of Bertone Cozzarelli Healthcare Architects and Cozzarelli Cirminiello Architects, specialists in the design

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CLASS NOTES of nursing homes, hospitals, and other health-related facilities.

An AIA member for nearly three decades, Cozzarelli was the 2004 AIA-NJ state president and recipient of the 2009 AIA-NJ Architect of the Year award.

Michele Dekelbaum (IE) is serv-

ing as vice president for performance excellence for the Phoebe Putney Health System in Georgia.

With over 20 years of healthcare experience, she is responsible for process-improvement initiatives designed to achieve significant operational savings and revenue enhancement while improving the quality of patient care and safety across the Phoebe system.

1980 Mark Harold (ChE) tells NJIT

Magazine that after graduation he worked for Chevron Research and Chevron USA in Richmond, California, for seven and a half years. For more than 25 years, he has worked for Nalco Company/ Nalco Energy Services in field sales and major refinery account management. Recently, he has taken the position of industry technical consultant with Nalco Energy Services in the areas of industrial cooling water and boiler-system operation and treatments. Harold and his wife, Lynn, live in Napa, California.

1987 Peter Burke (IE) shares the news

that he continues to work as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey.

In 2011, he completed a deployment to Afghanistan as his office’s forward support representative. He was competitively selected in March

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2014 as the deputy project manager for Combat Ammunition Systems – Indirect Fire. His team has life-cycle management responsibility for all Army mortar weapons, fire-control systems, and guided and conventional ammunition for indirect-fire systems. Life-cycle responsibility includes product development, production, fielding, and sustainment. His office also supports indirect-fire products for the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force, and numerous foreign clients.

Don Flood (ME), MS ’95 (Env. Eng.) has joined Hatch Mott MacDonald as its new group marketing manager. His extensive experience encompasses market research, corporate communications, public relations, special events, collateral development, and online marketing.

1988 Cynthia Frank (ChE) has been

named assistant vice president, manager, building materials at FM Approvals, which specializes in testing and certifying products and services that protect commercial and industrial property from loss.

She will be responsible for managing the testing and certification of building materials and roofing products. Frank began her career in 1988 working for FM Global as a property loss prevention consultant and held a variety of supervisory and managerial engineering positions with the company before joining FM Approvals.

1989 Richard Malagiere (ME) is

now of counsel to the law firm of Gertner, Mandel & Peslak, which is expanding its Intellectual Property

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Practice Group. Malagiere is an experienced litigator, specializing in patents and other intellectual property matters. He also has an extensive background in federal court litigation. Prior to becoming an attorney, he worked in the aerospace and manufacturing fields.

the organization’s treasurer. He is also a member of AIA-NJ’s Legislative and Government Affairs Committee and serves as vice chair of the New Jersey Architects Political Action Committee.

1991

Hongyu Chen MS (Materials Science), a Dow Fellow in the Asia/ Pacific research and development organization, has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). The APS cites Chen for pioneering contributions to the fundamental understanding of polymer viscoelasticity, phase behavior of polymer blends, deformation behavior of polymers, structure-property relationship of oriented polymers, and the application of polymer physics for polymer development.

Dennis Pavagadhi (ME), MS ’94 (Mgmt.) has been promoted to the position of director of operations support, reporting to the vice president of operations, at Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L).

He will be responsible for overseeing JCP&L’s 318 substations, including upgrades, maintenance and construction. He will also direct the company’s regional dispatch operations centers that direct line crews to outage locations, and coordinate the process of restoring power. Pavagadhi joined JCP&L in 1995 and has held a variety of operations and engineering positions.

1993 Bennet Dunkley (Arch.) is now a

principal in the Helpern Architects practice, based in New York City.

Born in the United Kingdom, he is a member of both the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Institute of British Architects.

He is also LEED-accredited by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Justin A. Mihalik (Arch.) is serv-

ing as the first vice president of the New Jersey chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIANJ). A principal at Essex Fellsbased J. A. Mihalik Architect LLC, he has been a member of AIA-NJ for 15 years and recently served two consecutive two-year terms as

1995

Tianxiong Fu PhD (ME) has

received the 2014 Asian American Engineer of the Year Award. Fu, a software engineer and senior manager at Siemens PLM Software in Texas, leads the NX Part Modeling core software development team. He directs the development of architectural and core enhancements to the application for each NX version release.

1996 Tushar Deshpande (Com-

puter/Information Science) is vice president for data and technology strategy with the Foundation Center. Since 1956, the Foundation Center has been a leading source of information about philanthropy worldwide. With headquarters in New York City, the Center connects philanthropic groups with essential resources.

1997

2004

Judy Donnelly MS (Arch.) will serve a two-year term as secretary of the New Jersey chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). The principal owner of Hackettstown-based Donnelly Architecture, LLC, she has been an active AIA member for more than 10 years. Donnelly is a member of Newark and Suburban Architects, one of AIA-NJ’s six local sections, serving as president in 2010.

Keith Ludwig (Eng. Tech./Surveying) has joined Dewberry, a professional services firm, as Survey Department manager in the Mount Laurel, New Jersey, office. Ludwig will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the department in addition to coordinating survey activities across Dewberry’s Northeast offices. He will also serve as the branch safety advocate.

1998

2005

Ben Lee MS (Mgmt.) will serve as

Joe Weaver (Eng. Tech./ME) has

2014 treasurer of the New Jersey chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA-NJ). Managing principal and chief financial officer of Morristown-based NK Architects, Lee has over 35 years of experience in architecture. A board-certified healthcare architect, he manages NK’s Healthcare Design Group.

joined CP Engineers & Architecture in Sparta, New Jersey. A licensed Professional Engineer and Certified Municipal Engineer, he has been responsible for the design and construction management of private and public improvements, including stormwater management analysis and design, and infrastructure and utility projects.

2000

2009

Robert Ward MS (Mgmt.) has

Jason Peist (Arch.), MS ’12 (Professional and Technical Communication) is regional associate director for the New Jersey Chapter and Region of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Peist is design director at T.M. Rybak & Associates, a full-service architectural, planning, interior design, engineering, construction management and design/build firm.

been appointed president and chief executive officer of Radius Health, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company focused on therapeutics for osteoporosis and other women’s health concerns. He brings more than 26 years of experience to Radius as a leader in the global pharmaceutical industry who has managed all stages of drug development and commercialization, and the process of building strategic partnerships.

2011 Uriel Arik Stern MS (Arch.)

has won the second-place U.S. award in the Urban Revitalization of Mass Housing competition sponsored by the United Nations through UN-Habitat to promote urban planning that integrates all

aspects of urban life in a sustainable manner. Stern, who practices in Summit, New Jersey, registered in the competition’s “Recent Graduate” category. He was recognized for “Green Contour,” which proposes connecting people living in New York City more closely with the natural environment through green space, even for residents of high-rise buildings.

IN MEMORIAM The NJIT community is saddened by the passing of the following alumni: Arthur Silverman ’39 Charles W. Oriel ’41 Joseph J. Padalino ’44 Stanley Lenox ’47 J. Robert Brown ’49 Charles E. Jacobson ’49, ’52 Stephen F. Gill ’50, ’59 Daniel Paul Biondo ’52, ’61 Arthur Makris ’52 Robert J. Turbett ’53 Lindsay M. Collins ’55 Edmund H. Hecht ’56 Max Karl Hentschel ’61 Armido L. Sigismondi ’61 Richard J. Rosivack ’62 Edmund H. Nowinski ’67 Edmond Knowles ’72 John Chomiak ’74 John R. Norek ’76 Kurt W. Streib ’76 Ralph Clemente ’77 Joseph A. D’Abundo ’79 Marianne Lisowski ’80 David P. Curran ’87 Christakis Nicolaou ’89 Peter Mazza ’90 James M. Kelly ’94 Michael Keith McSherry ’97 David Maver ’04

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ALUMNI CALENDAR SAVE THE DATE!

CELEBRATION 2014 Friday, November 14 Pleasantdale Chateau West Orange, New Jersey

NJIT’s annual festive evening in support of endowed scholarships for students, and honoring donors and accomplished alumni.

Information: Jacquie Rhodes 973-596-3407 or rhodes@njit.edu

CORPORATE CLUBS

REGIONAL CLUBS

NJIT’s Corporate Clubs provide valuable networking opportunities for alumni in the workplace while also assisting NJIT students and faculty.

Current Corporate Clubs include: Hatch Mott MacDonald, PSE&G, Schering-Plough, Turner Construction and United Parcel Service. For more information:

NJIT Regional Clubs are planning events across the country.

For more information:

www.njit.edu/alumni/clubs

www.njit.edu/alumni/clubs

YOUNG ALUMNI CLUB The Young Alumni Club organizes social, networking, and educational events for alumni and their families. For more information: www.njit.edu/alumni/clubs

Also visit www.njit.edu/celebration

For the most current information about Alumni Association activities, visit www.njit.edu/alumni.

Join us on Facebook and LinkedIn too.

Go to www.njit.edu/alumni/community.

ALUMNI ON ICE Members of the NJIT Young Alumni Club skated to a good time last January at the Ice Vault Arena in Wayne, New Jersey.

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AT THE EDGE

WINNING ARCHITECTURAL IMAGES

For the third year in a row, School of Art + Design Director Glenn Goldman is a winner in the annual architectural photography contest sponsored by the West Jersey Section of the American Institute of Architects. A series of four photographs taken in Ireland received awards and were selected for publication in the organization’s 2014 calendar.

“Structure and Beauty” (above), captured in the chapel of Dublin Castle, was

named the Best Overall Entry and appears on the cover of the calendar. “Cobwebs and Columns” (right), taken in Kilkenny, is among the thirteen winners and the image for October. Two additional photographs, “Back of House,” an unusual look at late additions at the rear of Dublin Castle, and “Reflections of the Custom House,” taken from across the Liffey River, were named as merit selections and also published. http://art.njit.edu

NON-PROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE PAID LANCASTER, PA PERMIT NO. 299

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