The College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn Stat University started on 1999. The main purpose of this college is to fulfill the rapidly growing needs of information science and technology.
I think the flavor of our college is collaberation and interdisciplinary. IST offers many different interdisciplines programs to both graduate students and undergrduate students. There are two unique bachelor's degree programs: Information Sciences and Technology, and Security and Risk Analysis. For graduate students, there are more opportunities, they can choose their own advisor and program based their research interests. The research areas in IST nearly includs every aspect of people's lives, from education, work, entertainment, health, safety, to national security.
Although there are no departments within IST, it is structured mainly by different research Labs and research centers. We have five big research centers in IST, they are Certer for Infomation Assurance, Center for the Information society, Enterprise informatics and integration center, Network-centric congnition and information fusion, Penn state center for human-computer interaction. Beside these, there is one a affiliated research center, Institute for information policy. Under these research centers, IST has more than ten different Labs. Although they independent research centers and Labs, most of them collaborate with one or more other centers or Labs, as well as collaborate with outside colleges, departments, research institutes or companies. I think this is the most attractive feature of IST.
Now I am working at RFID Lab which is under the Center for Infomation Assurance. It also associates with college of communication, college of engineering and smeal college of business. The missions of the center are: conduct a broad-based research on various aspects (theoretical and applied; technical and managerial; wired and wireless, etc.) of information and cyber security; educate and train information security professionals through degree and continuing education programs, and to insure that information security awareness is instilled in all Penn. State Students; provide assistance and technical supports to industry, non-profit organizations, government, and individuals in the information and cyber security area.
Our Labs' goal and my work is research the broad security issues relate to RFID, especially in the healthcare and supply chain management areas.
Good initiative in sharing what our security lab is about as well as our collaboration with other colleges.
Don't forget to comment on mine!