Babak D. Beheshti, Ph.D., professor and associate dean of NYIT School of Engineering and Computing Sciences, moderated a panel discussion, "Smart Cities and the Internet of Things," at the City & State's 2018 Digital NY Summit & Awards conference on February 22, 2018. The panel included Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, NYC Councilman Rodriguez, NYC Department of Transportation CTO Cordell Schacter, Benjamin (Britt) Harter, director of state and local government practice at PWC, and Joe Fasone, founder and CEO of Pilot. The conference is a day-long program of thought-provoking presentations and candid discussions featuring New York's information leaders from government and industry.

David Nadler, Ph.D., assistant professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Technology and Sustainability," presented the poster, "Incorporating Stormwater Management into an Environmental Curriculum," at the Science, Business, and Education of Sustainable Infrastructure conference, hosted by the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) in Washington, DC, January 23-25, 2018.

Ziqian (Cecilia) Dong, Ph.D., associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, had an article titled "Feature reduction for classification of daily activities through kinematic data from smartphones," published in Smart Health, Vol. 5-6, Pages 40-50, ISBN 2352-6483, January 2018. The article was co-authored by Yu Wan, an NYIT graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Michael Nizich, Ph.D., adjunct assistant professor of computer science and director of the Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center (ETIC), received an award as "a staff member who exemplifies leadership, mentorship, and who has demonstrated commitment to bettering the lives of students" by The National Society of Leadership and Success, Sigma Alpha Pi. Nizich was nominated for the award by NYIT student members of the organization.

N. Sertac Artan, Ph.D., assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, co-authored a chapter "Security, Trust, and Privacy for Cloud Computing in Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems," in the book Data Security in Cloud Computing, with Wenjia Li, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science, and Jonathan Voris, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science.

Sarah Meyland, J.D., associate professor of environmental technology and sustainability, was appointed to the New York State Drinking Water Quality Council by Governor Cuomo. The Council is charged with advising New York State and the involved agencies (DOH and DEC) on such issues as drinking water standards for chemicals of concern that are not regulated at the federal level.

Fang Li, Ph.D., assistant professor of mechanical engineering, in partnership with X-wave Innovations, Inc (XII), recently received a $125,000 NASA Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I grant to develop a passive, wireless, high-temperature embedded sensor system that is capable of providing high-bandwidth measurements of temperature, pressure, and strain on both rotating and non-rotating propulsion engine components. This system will provide a highly flexible instrumentation solution to monitor remote or inaccessible measurement locations for NASA's rocket propulsion test facilities.

N. Sertac Artan, Ph.D., assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, along with co-author, Ziqian (Cecilia) Dong, Ph.D., associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, presented two papers, "TETRIS: Smartphone-to-Smartphone Screen-Based Visible Light Communication," and "Indoor localization through visible light characterization using front-facing smartphone camera," at The 14th International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (IEEE MASS 2017): The Fourth National Workshop for REU Research in Networking and Systems (2017 4th REU Research in N&S), Orlando, FL, in October, 2017.

Xun Yu, Ph.D., associate professor and department chair of mechanical engineering, is serving as a guest editor for a special issue on "High Performance and Smart Nano Engineered Composites for Civil Infrastructures," for Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology, a SAGE journal, with the first papers to be published in October 2017.

Xun Yu, Ph.D., associate professor of mechanical engineering and department chair, was selected as an associate editor for the new ASME Journal of Engineering and Science in Medical Diagnostics and Therapy.