Stockings for Soldiers

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Sadly, there are many soldiers overseas that will not be home for the holidays. The Top Secret Colonials are collecting stockings to send to the soldiers. If you would like to fill a stocking for a soldier, you can pick one up in Dr. Paullet’s office (Wheatley 229). The stockings must be returned to her office by December 5th to be shipped.

Below is a partial list of items that are needed:

– Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Nutter Butter Cookies
– Trail Mix
– Beef Jerky
– Granola Bars
– Breakfast Bars
– Slim Jims
– Twizzlers
– M&M’s (all flavors) – other chocolate will melt
– Pop Tarts
– Cards
– Crossword Puzzles
– Soduko
– Gum
– Caramel Popcorn
– Gummie Candy
– Chapstick
– Hot Cocoa Mix, Lemonade packets, etc.
– Nuts
– Pretzels
For more information, contact Dr. Paullet at paullet@rmu.edu

Invite to Participate in Student Research Survey

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Dear Students:

You are invited to participate in a survey conducted by Holden Thee as part of his Honors Thesis research. The purpose of this survey is to better understand factors that contribute to password generation. This survey will take approximately 5 minutes to complete.

There are no foreseeable risks associated with this project. There may be no direct benefits from this research. All responses are confidential, anonymous, and responses will only be accessible to the researchers. Your participation is voluntary, and you may withdraw from this project at any time.

Please toss a coin (or click following link: http://justflipacoin.com/) to begin, and then:

 If heads, please follow this link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1EQFNplujeScmfDN0F6fj-k3ATesY3K5BqlxaYWnm_Q0

 If tails, please follow this link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1NpYpZ9yTkZW8sxFOqGNpfUghKKqwVL_R32wd8awANh0

If you decide to participate, please do not use any passwords that you use elsewhere.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Holden Thee at hdtst466@mail.rmu.edu or Dr. Wenli Wang at wangw@rmu.edu. You may also contact the Institutional Review Board at irb@rmu.edu or (412) 397-6227.

Dr. Charles Woratschek honored as an AITP-EDSIG Fellow

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woratschekThis week, the CIS Department congratulates Dr. Charles Woratschek who was inducted as an AITP-EDSIG Fellow at the annual EDSIG Conference for Information Systems and Computing. AITP-EDSIG Fellows are inducted in honor of their long-term, meaningful, and effective support of AITP-EDSIG in its mission to improve information systems (IS) education and foster the careers of IS faculty.

Dr. Woratschek is Professor Emeritus of Computer and Information Systems at Robert Morris University. His career in teaching began in middle school science where he taught for four years. He took a leave of absence in his fifth year to pursue a Master’s Degree in Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh and never looked back. Point Park University hired him as an adjunct faculty in 1982 to teach courses in FORTRAN, data communications, and database. He remained in that position for six years. Robert Morris University hired him full time in 1983 to teach COBOL and Introduction to Computing. During his 33 years at Robert Morris University he went on to teach a variety of courses in programming languages, human computer interaction, database management systems, operating systems, and data warehouse. His first EDSIG conference was in San Antonio, Texas in 1998. Since then he has served as program co-chair, papers co-chair, new member orientation co-chair, and on the editorial board for the Journal of Information Systems Education. Dr. Woratschek has a B.S., M.S.I.S., and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and a M.S.Ed. from Duquesne University.

IMG_3209

Pictured above is the induction ceremony with past AITP-EDSIG Fellows, from left to right: Paul Leidig, William Tastle, Charles Woratschek, Alan Peslak, and Bruce White.

Congratulations, Dr. Woratschek, on receiving this prestigious honor recognizing your career-long dedication and service to the field of information systems, and your students.

RobotTutor Talk on November 15th

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As part of the RMU Entrepreneurship Week 2017, The Massey Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in collaboration with the RMU ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Chapter housed in the Department of Engineering – SEMS, cordially invite you to attend an exciting talk discussing RobotTutor, 2017 $1M Xprize Winner.
Wednesday 11/15/2017
10:00am to 11:30 am
Room: Franklin 203

SET credit available

Highlights: Bitcoin w/ Dr. Werner Kristjanpoller

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In case you missed the presentation Bitcoin: A New Paradigm or a Financial Bubble?, here is what was discussed by Dr. Werner Kristjanpoller, our RMU Fall 2017 Rooney International Scholar.

Dr. Werner Kristjanpoller:

  • professor in the Industrial Engineering Department at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (UTFSM), in Chile
  • Career Director of Industrial Engineering for UTFSM’s main Campus
  • Director of 3ie – the Business Incubator of UTFSM
  • Ph.D in Business Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, in Spain
  • MBA from UTFSM
  • Industrial Engineer
  • Vast research and teaching span includes:
    • finance and economics
    • econometrics
    • application of artificial intelligence to forecast financial assets
  • Published in several journals such as:
    • Expert Systems with Applications
    • Applied Energy
    • Computational Economics
    • Sex Roles
    • Journal of Pension Economics and Finance
    • Emerging Markets Finance and Trade
  • His plans at RMU are to research crypto currency, and develop a hypothesis for returns and volatility of Bitcoin.

The Presentation:

Bitcoin: hot topic – the fundamentals of currency.

Need for currency

  • Barter(good for small civilizations) -> (increased commerce)currency
  • EX: salt, seafood shells, cow, vegetables, stones, etc.
  • Gold: most popular, and silver appeared – prevented currency from expiring. Creation of coins
    • Gold stores – transferred your gold to a paper equivalent; beginning of bills
    • Needed coins/gold to support the money being printed
  • Gold system – all the money of a country needed to be able to be turned into gold that each central bank protected. Since 1930. Money could be changed to gold, and vice versa.
    • Every country has responsibility – but then it was left up to the US dollar to be the standard for all coins.
    • EX: pesos to US dollar
    • 1973: Nixon decided to end the condition of the uS dollar as the standard because we did not have enough gold to support the bills.
      • US was running out of gold needed to support all the circulating dollars.
      • TODAY: no metal support. Money only has value because we trust that it has value. -> essential to the financial value of Bitcoin.

Crypto Currency – 2009; virtual money; seeks decentralization – no central state controlling this; no one has control over the internet.

  • Only generates a number of previously sdefined units, at a rate that is limited by a previously established and publicly known value
  • We have a fixed amount
  • More than 800 currencies have been created – bad
  • Allows you to make purchases internationally and be exchanged for another currency without intermediaries
  • Some think that there will be no tellers, cash registers, queues, or waits;
    • Amazon Go*: no lines – just walkout and receive payment to your amazon account; Dec 2016. Use of virtual currency and algorithms to keep track of what you pick up, and you can just leave.
    • Bank behind transactions.

Bitcoin – virtual currency, which is generated in a consensual network that allows a new payment system.

  • First specificiation of the bitcoin protocol and proof: Satoshi Nakamoto (referred to this as his pseudonym) in 2009 in an email list launched this proof of concept.
  • Numerous developers working on the bitcoin protocol; more people began to grow exponentially into the community of bitcoin: the more people who trust in bitcoin, the more industries will begin accepting bitcoin as a currency.
  • Bitcoin has no owners
  • Bitcoin network shares public accounting called “block chain” – system behind bitcoin

How does bitcoin work:

  • Exchange money electronically like an email or a text
  • Makes sure no one can send money from someone else’s account
  • Signature required based on cryptography – used to create signatures through decryption proving that it is them; signatures cannot be copied because they are different for each transaction
  • Provides a decentralized system
  • Maintainers – keeps personal copy of ledger and updates it
  • Fraud can cause changes in ledgers – vote on which one is the correct ledger using a mathematical formula by having users solve the problem, hand in the answer, each vote has a cost in electricity and computing power.
    • Keeping it fair: each puzzle is based on previous answer before starting
    • Only thing that makes people finish it faster is through having more electricity and computing power.
    • Solving puzzles -> small money; these people are called “miners”; randomly generating new money for the solving of puzzles.
  • Reliability: accurate ledger is found through mathematical probability

Advantages:

  • Ease of payment – send and receive instantaneously
  • Security and control – bitcoin users have complete control over their transactions
  • Very low rates – payment swith bitcoin are currently processed at low rates or at no charge. Can send money from US to Japan with no additional cost instantaneously.
  • Less risk of fraud
  • Neutral and transparent – all people know the quantity of bitcoin in the world – it is open to all; all information is available

Disadvantages:

  • Degree of acceptance – many people still do not know Bitcoin; “big barrier to jump”
  • Volatility – the total value of bitcoins in circulation and the number of businesses using bitcoin are very small compared to what it may become.
    • volatitlity can be used to as an advantage in some cases
    • Bitcoin: keeps increasing in price, lowering in price, coming up to $6,000 per Bitcoin soon.
    • Financial battle: because it continues to change
  • Developing System – still in the beta phase with many incomplete features in development.
    • “Déjà vu” – “what is internet” (1994) “why would you buy a computer” “bitcoin”(made in 2009) – designed to be self-stabilizing.
    • Bitcoin is no longer a scam? Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfeind said his bank was considering bitcoin.
    • Howard Marks – billionaire investor; referred to it as a fad but has now accepted it as having the most valuable characteristic – people believe in and trust bitcoin as a currency.

Is bitcoin a threat?

  • Fear about crypto currency because it implies to lost power – loss of state power – loss of centralization.
  • Several industries can be negatively affected with the break-in of Bitcoin
  • Several governments have been forced to regulate their use or ban it.
  • Several governments have been pushing cashless
    • If all transactions are done by card or transfers with banks, the govt could lose power
  • Some banks in Japan want to launch their own crypto currency – J coin.
    • Japanese government could be accepting
    • Against economy’s basis in Japan to reject Bitcoin.
    • If japan launches J-coin; and you have to choose one – you are more likely to choose J coin over Bitcoin due to the fact that J coin is centrally supported by an entire country.

Bitcoin behavior:

  • Research in progress “Forecasting the Bitcoin Volatility”
  • Kristjanpoller & Minutolo 2017.
  • Mixing econometrics model with networking
  • Generate bitcoin volatility for a week, weeks, and a month.

Q&A:

A question was asked about the legal implications of the court trying to define Bitcoin (property/currency/both?)

  • Report gains in bitcoin as gains in property
  • Federal government’s legal system is trying to see how to view it as well as how the IRS should view it.
  • IRS – asset not taxed; official policy that it is property and should be taxed as such and not currency creates an inefficiency in the market.  Smart companies will trade capitol in Ireland to bitcoin and then bring it back to the US because it will get taxed differently.  If not seen as a currency, then it cannot be taxed as currency.
  • J coin is an attempt to change the tax on that earnings.

Recommended readings/videos:

  • The Aisles have Eyes
  • The rise and mine of Bitcoin
  • Money: the Unofficial Biography

Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship U.S. Department of Energy

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Job Description:

The Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program places students from 2 and 4-year undergraduate institutions as paid interns in science and engineering research activities at DOE national laboratories and facilities, working with laboratory staff scientists and engineers on projects related to ongoing research programs. Appointments are for 10 weeks during the Summer term, are open to US Citizens and US Lawful Permanent Residents, include a weekly stipend, reimbursement for one round trip domestic travel to the participant’s host DOE laboratory, and possibilities for a housing allowance. More than 850 internships are sponsored annually.

Application Instructions:

Full program information and descriptions, including links to the online application system, are available at http://science.energy.gov/wdts/suli/

Applications for the summer program are due January 12, 2018 at 5:00 PM ET.

Online Application Address:
https://apps.orau.gov/suli/Account/Login
For more information click the link below:

Cyber Security Presentation – Monday, November 13th

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On Monday, November 13th, there will be a presentation by an employee from a major financial institution. He will discuss how the Cyber Security division of organizations operates along with detailing the varying arms of an organization’s Cyber Division to include cyber forensics, counterintelligence and insider threats. The presentation will take place in the Wheatley Atrium from 4:15pm to 5:30 pm.

One hour of SET credit can be earned. Refreshments will be served. This is a Top Secret Colonials event. For more information, contact Dr Paullet at paullet@rmu.edu.

Software Development Co-op with ANSYS, INC.

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ANSYS, Inc. is looking for students to participate in their Spring and Summer 2018 Software Development Co-ops. ANSYS is located in Canonsburg and is the global leader in engineering simulation software that helps bring ideas to life. Co-ops rotate between school and full-time work assignments each semester. They develop and test our industry-leading simulation software while gaining real experience in their field of study.

The Spring 2018 Co-op is a 40-hour per week paid position starting January 2018 and concluding April 2018.

The Summer 2018 Co-op is a 40-hour per week paid position starting May 2018 and concluding August 2018.

Responsibilities 
• Work with software developers to design, implement, and debug
• Engineering simulation features
• UI toolkit components
• Infrastructure process and tools
• Online help systems

Requirements
• Commitment to three (3) semester rotations for Engineers and two (2) semesters for Computer Science in partnership with University’s Co-op Office
• Pursuing a BS in Computer Science or Computer Engineering with a GPA of 3.0 or higher
• Must be currently enrolled in a full-time degree program and returning to the program after the completion of the co-op
• Exposure to C++, C#, Java or Python
• Sharp and tenacious problem solving skills
• Team player, responsible, and motivated

Desired Skills
• Exposure to object oriented programming
• Strong math skills
• Web development experience

For the Spring 2018 Co-op, students can apply here or through ColonialTRAK. Applications must be submitted by Wednesday, November 15.

For the Summer 2018 Co-op, students can apply here or through ColonialTRAK. Applications must be submitted by March 1, 2018.

Job Opportunity: Apogee IT Services

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Apogee IT Services is looking for a part-time Senior Shop Technician for their location in Sewickley. They are looking for a team player who is passionate about technology, has strong interpersonal and organizational skills, and has excellent attention to detail. The salary is 10$/hour, with 20-35 hours per week.

The Senior Shop Technician will be responsible and accountable for maintaining the imaging infrastructure, quality checking all configurations, configurations of high level devices, escalation resolution, dispatching tickets, analysis and resolution; effective customer communication; and documentation in the ticketing system according to Apogee standards.

If you are looking for more information about this opportunity, click here to view the job on ColonialTrak.

To apply, email your resume to: jnusser@apogeeits.com

Highlights: Splunk Presentation with U.S. Steel’s James Wolfe

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This event was held October 26th, and in case you missed it, here are some of the highlights to be taken away from the presentation.  So, if you were in class and regretted now skipping class for this, we have got you covered!

Main Points:

  • Searches – he discussed how when you use the search bar, it is important to understand its format:
    • [general code] | [less general] | [continually more specific search]
    • as you can tell, the idea is that there are commands that you use that are processed from left to write, and each command is separate by the |(pipe).
  • Save searches! – with there being so many different ways to slice all of the network traffic that Splunk is managing, having different frequented searches saved is very convenient to insure more time searching network traffic, and not google for Splunk commands.
  • Statistics – in order for anomaly detection to work, there needs to be an idea of what is normal.  One person’s smile could be another person’s bad-day face.  It is important to judge off of what is normal for the network traffic, much like judging someone’s behavior off of what is normal for that person.  The statistics generated are what determines what falls within normal behavior for their network.
  •  Real-time Graphs & Charts – generating graphs and charts that will actually change and adjust in real time are super important.  It allows an easy way to understand what is going on in the network – instantaneously.  Wolfe stressed that bosses will love something so clean, visually appealing, and content-specific.

Splunk application:

This presentation was about Splunk, the security event manager/log aggregation software.  If you have had Paullet’s class and suffered through the wonderfully challenging Enron emails assignment, then you have had a small taste of this software’s capabilities.  Splunk can be used for a wide variety of applications because of its ability to organize/index large sums of information with ease into databases, or indexes.  James Wolfe focused on Splunk’s network security applications.  James Wolfe is a security administrator for U.S. Steel, so his job requires him to focus on network traffic such as IPs, users, or anything that could potentially indicate a point of failure for their network.  Wolfe explained that the beauty of Splunk is that you can start looking without needing to know exactly what it is that you are looking for – exactly how I described my use of Splunk when trying to find incriminating Enron emails.  Because security is the importance of the job, he discussed the commands that would be useful for security.  These things included:

  • dedup – removes duplicates in your search.
    • EX: dedup user, src_ip
  • wineventlog
    • 4625 – this code indicates a failure to log in

A very basic example shown to us to show how the data was being used to detect anomalies was through the ratio or successful to unsuccessful log ins for users.  By creating a baseline formula for the rate of successful logins for each user, the computer can flag any time there is a change in this rate that goes within 1-2 standard deviations.  The data is all producing algorithms and equations based on what you – the user of the Splunk software – deems important.

  • table_raw – views the raw informaiton that splunk pulled the information from for the databases/indexes

This raw information was very education in seeing how convenient the software is, because the raw version was pretty jumbled, messy, and difficult to understand.

Career Advice:

  • Deskside/IT support is a good career start – you learn to troubleshoot
  • Ask as many questions as you can – be willing to do projects; this will make you valuable.
  • CERTIFICATIONS: N+* – basic fundamentals of networking.
  • Government – certifications are legally required
  • CCNA – CISCO; mid-level
  • Maintain a strong work ethic
  • Log into a firewall – download free for home*
  • 2 year schools like ITT tech allows hands on experience
  • 4 year degree preferable, but less hands on – it proves that you are hardworking and willing to put in the time necessary; this ties in greatly with having a strong work ethic.
  • Microsoft imagine account; dream spark; 2016 data center OS worth $3,000 [we get it for free at RMU, so utilize it!]
    • Spin up a DHCE from home
  • All acronyms – know.
  • Splunk: just saying that you have worked with Splunk automatically gives you an edge against the competition for any job in security.
  • Google: useful; know that it really is alright to google what you do not understand when doing anything on the computer.  There is so much to know, and as long as you accept that you will be learning throughout your entire career, you will be able to stay in demand with employers.

Fun Facts:

  • Companies have filters on their employee’s computers preventing them from going on certain sites.  Because you cannot access these through google, users will use Bing as their loophole to sites that they are not supposed to access.
  • U.S. Steel, much like other companies, uses firewall redundancy to prevent any debilitating security errors.
  • Splunk is free to download; free for developers license. All software is free all you need is to buy your own server with 16 gigs – plenty for an at home – of ram.  Buy second NIC. Spin up VMs. Download licenses.