News

What's been happening

Coverage of the lab's work, awards, and the people doing it.

8 Sep 2026

Dr. Merkel Presents to the Rochester Museum and Science Center Council

Dr. Merkel joined the Rochester Museum and Science Center Council’s monthly meeting to discuss the state of artificial intelligence, the exciting opportunities ahead, and how the Brain Lab is addressing some of the significant challenges related to AI resource cost and trustworthiness.

21 Aug 2026 Two people standing either side of a screen showing the dissertation defence title slide.

Hagar Hendy Defends Dissertation

Brain Lab and RIT ECE doctoral candidate Hagar Hendy has successfully defended her dissertation, “Time-Domain Circuit Design Techniques for Neuromorphic Computing.” Hagar’s work advances the efficiency and reliability of time-domain computing for edge AI. Congratulations, Dr. Hendy!

5 Aug 2026 Three people standing either side of a projection screen showing the SpikeRFF thesis defence title slide.

Karthik Kumar Defends Thesis on Efficient Spike-Based Learning

Congratulations to Karthik Kumar on successfully defending his MS in AI thesis, “SpikeRFF: Learning Forward with Layer-Local Plasticity and Semi-Hard Negatives.” His work explores self-supervised learning of spiking neural networks without backpropagation. Thank you to Alex Ororbia and Sathwika Bavikadi for serving on Karthik’s committee.

29 Jul 2026

Manali Dangarikar to present at NAECON 2026

Manali Dangarikar will present her research, “Understanding fault tolerance of adversarially robust pruned models,” at the 2026 NAECON conference in Cincinnati.

27 Mar 2026

RIT researchers build funding momentum

RIT researchers supported by internal and external funding sources help bring creative and innovative ideas to fruition.

30 May 2025

Machine learning predicts where the HHL quantum algorithm will pay off

Quantum Zeitgeist covers research by Sonia Lopez Alarcon and Cory Merkel, associate professors of computer engineering, with Mark Danza ’25 MS (computer engineering).

22 Jan 2025

New research shows AI systems are getting closer to processing information like humans

RIT engineering professor Cory Merkel was one of more than a dozen researchers in neuromorphic computing contributing findings published on Jan. 22 in…

13 Dec 2024

Student spotlight: Fulbright student’s research applies AI to real-world problems

Diana Velychko, a Fulbright master’s student in artificial intelligence, is paving the way for more intuitive artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Her work focuses on the intersection of human perception and AI, aiming to bridge the gap between how people see the world and how machines interpret it.

8 Nov 2024

RIT professor proposes new way to make artificial intelligence smarter and greener

RIT Assistant Professor Alexander Ororbia published a paper on smarter and greener artificial intelligence in Science Advances.

19 Feb 2024

Computer engineering faculty member joins national initiative on neuromorphic computing

RIT computer engineering faculty member contributes system testing expertise to USC’s Center of Neuromorphic Computing under Extreme Environments.

12 Dec 2022

Computer engineering becomes part of inaugural program focused on neuromorphic technologies

RIT recently became one of the inaugural academic partners in the BrainChip University AI Accelerator Program. As part of the partnership, RIT’s computer engineering program will receive hardware as well as lecture modules for classes detailing how the novel chips can be programmed and used to provide neuromorphic computing solutions to real-world problems.