What is IST?

Opened in 1999 as one of the pioneers of the I-School community, the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) is Penn State's visionary response to the rapidly growing need in almost every field for leadership in information sciences and related technologies. The foundation of IST is the ITP (Information Technology People) triangle which specifies the interaction and the synergy between the three components - Information, technology and people. The governing idea is that these three components constantly impacts and influences each other during their interaction. IST favors interdisciplinary study and research that integrates traditional disciplines such as computer science, business, psychology and sociology to solve the new emerging problems with the proliferation of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) today. With a new comprehensive lens, IST fulfills pragmatic requirements to address and resolve issues that need different skills and methodologies to be underpinned. So the strength of IST is in collaboration and openness to leverage from the synergistic approach of diverse perspectives.  

With no separating departments, IST is vaguely structured into several research groups such as Human Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence and Informatics, Geographic Information Systems, Cyber Security and Privacy and etc. Faculty with diverse background contributes to one or more research areas and works with other faculty members collaboratively (see table 1). According to the Social Network Analysis project conducted last fall in my IST511 class, IST faculty members work closely with each other in small research groups on interdisciplinary topics and have connection with others in different research groups occasionally on special topics. They solve pragmatic problems effectively. Although different from other colleges with diverse departments specifying branch studies, IST performs very well in this information age without clear structure.

With my background in Software Engineering, I am familiar with technology and deal with information but I have little touch on the people side. IST provides me an excellent environment to do interdisciplinary research. For the technology side, we have a lot of RFID devices such as tags, readers and some middleware in our RFID lab. We also develop some applications to show the RFID technology. For the information side, RFID technology will generate a huge amount of data most of which are meaningless. Thus, extracting meaningful information at the application level for business management is critical in RFID adoption. For the people side, implementation of RFID technology will lead to privacy issues that are uppermost important to customers in supermarkets and patients in hospitals. If these issues are not taken care of, the technology will never come into real life successfully.

Table 1: Faculty Research Areas