about IST

The creation of IST started with a visionary challenge from Penn State President Graham Spanier: How could the University address the enormous workforce gap in information technology and help government, industry, and society face the daunting technological and human challenges of tomorrow? This initial goal endues IST with the mission of bridging the gap between traditional research paradigms and the emerging problems, and looking for synergy of multidiscipline. The ITP triangle--Information, Technology and People--is the fundamental idea, underlying both research and education of IST. The college highlights the interdisciplinary nature and provides encouraging environment of interdisciplinary development for faculties and students to form a creative community.

Different from other colleges, IST has no departments. That means there is no collaboration boundary between departments. IST faculties are experts in different research areas, like HCI, Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval, Security and Privacy, Social Network, Psychology, Information Policy, etc., but they collaborate with each other in projects across disciplines such as Health Informatics, Medical Informatics, Emergency Response, Enterprise Informatics, Globalization, etc. so that real world problems are studied from multiple perspectives, including technical, cognitive and social aspects. Besides, new concepts and theories are developed in these kinds of cross-disciplinary collaboration. IST as a whole is structured more like a web, emphasizing connection as well as diversity.

For myself, I'm more on the technical side. My research is mainly about image processing, image content understanding, and data mining which is also related to cognition, information visualization, art, etc. Human visual perception is a magical process, and scientists from different disciplines devote great efforts to understand this process. As engineers, we make use of knowledge of other fields and develop practical systems to assist appreciation of images.