IST Students Participate in 2015 Undergraduate Exhibition

Three Penn State Wilkes-Barre Information Sciences & Technology (IST) seniors went to University Park on April 8th to participate in the 2015 Undergraduate Exhibition. Senior IST students Robert Carey, Joseph Demellier, and Andrew Hill, supervised by Wei-Fan Chen and Frouke de Quillettes represented the Wilkes-Barre campus.

Carey, Demellier, and Hill worked on a mobile merchandising application for local musicians to generate revenue and gain exposure called Musicbuff. The app is separated into three major segments: Social, Sales, & Analytics. The social side of the app is set up similar to a Twitter or Facebook feed; any new albums, t-shirts, events, etc. will show up for any artists followed. The sales side bridges the gap between the standard user and the musician. Here all of the products a group has listed for sale. The goal is to provide a platform for artists to distribute their products without having to deal with the logistical barriers associated with running an e-commerce site. Vendors get detailed analytics about the sales made and a complete breakdown of earnings. Currently, there is a working website but in the near future the plan is to work on developing mobile applications for Android and iOS devices.

Undergraduate students from all Penn State campuses were invited to present their research and creative work at the Exhibition's poster sessions. Posters entered in the events included: arts and humanities (including visual arts), engineering, health and life sciences, physical sciences, and social and behavioral sciences or as course-based projects in any discipline. Monetary prizes were awarded to the top entries in each poster category. The Gerald A. Hauser Award was given to the exhibition entry judged to be the best overall. Other awards include the Phi Kappa Phi Peter T. Luckie Award for Outstanding Research by a Junior and the University Libraries Award for Information Literacy.

"The event was gave us a great chance to get feedback on our ideas and talk to some musicians that were dealing with the very problem we are trying to solve," says Robert Carey. "Our group was more than happy to participate in the event and would recommend any students at Penn State Wilkes-Barre to take advantage of the opportunity."