What job will studies in information technology and/or cybersecurity equip you for? The Department of Information Technology and Management has posted a fairly comprehensive list of possible job titles for graduates of degrees from our department. It’s also available in PDF form. We hope to link brief pop-up job descriptions to each of these job titles, and if any students would like to help with that we would welcome their assistance. Some of those are already enabled. (Contact Professor Trygstad, trygstad@iit.edu if you want to help.) https://www.itm.iit.edu/data/itjobroles.html.
The Cyber Career Pathways Tool from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will help you identify, build, and navigate a potential cyber career pathway by increasing your understanding of the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to begin, transition, or advance your cyber career. The tool presents a new and interactive way to explore work roles within the NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework. It depicts the cyber workforce as five distinct, yet complementary, skill communities. It also highlights core attributes among each of the 52 work roles and offers actionable insights for employers, professionals, and individuals considering a career in cyber. https://niccs.us-cert.gov/workforce-development/cyber-career-pathways.
Google Drive File Stream: We’ve recently had a great addition to our Google for Education services: Google Drive File Stream.
Like many good things around here, this was brought to our attention by one of our students.
Google Drive File Stream, once installed on your Windows PC or Mac, will mount your Illinois Tech Google Drive as a local drive on your system. You can treat it just like any other drive; in Windows it even has a drive letter. And it’s fast. You get two directories on the drive: your own Google Drive and your Shared Drives (what used to he called Team Drives). Log onto your Illinois Tech Google account and go to https://support.google.com/drive/answer/7329379 to download the app and get started. First uninstall the Google Drive application or Google Drive Backup and Sync app if you have either installed. For some reason the text in the installation app on both PCs we installed it on appeared as gibberish, but you might want to use the command-line installer anyway. Open a command line in your download directory, and run “
GoogleDriveFSSetup --silent --desktop_shortcut --gsuite_shortcuts=false
“. There is a daily limit of 750 GB of file transfer but this just means you can’t upload your terabyte hard drive all in one day. A HUGE workflow enhancer; enjoy!
Free books are always nice. There are a fair number of textbooks released regularly under the Creative Commons or GNU Free Documentation Licenses, and not surprisingly many of them are on IT subjects…oh, and on discrete mathematics. (We hear ITM students may need a little boost there.) These books may be a good supplement to a course or may just help you learn something new on your own. Read more…
IBM has made a large variety of educational resources available for free in the areas of big data, touching both data management and data analytics. This includes both pre-defined learning tracks and individual courses. Most courses take 3 to 8 hours to complete and can be entirely done using either open source tools or the resources on the IBM Bluemix cloud, available though our Software! portal at http://www.itm.iit.edu/software/webstore.html. These courses are a great supplement for students in the MIS or Data Management curriculum who want to build their knowledge and abilities in analytics and big data management using tools like Spark, Hadoop, Seahorse, Jupyter, R, Rstudio, System T, Watson, and Scala. To access the courses, go to https://bigdatauniversity.com/.
Free is always good, and beyond our Microsoft DreamSpark Premium there are a variety of free tools available to students such as Autodesk 3D Software including AutoCad, RipTiger Software, and even professional prototyping software such as Axure. See the full list of freebies as well as student discounts at https://slickdeals.net/f/8500607-2016-students-freebies-offers-software-membership-free-more.
How much space do you have on your MyIIT Google Drive? If your answer was anything less than infinite, you were wrong. According to an announcement on the Google for Education Blog, Drive for Education is available to all Google Apps for Education accounts at no charge and includes Unlimited storage. No more worrying about how much space you have left or about which user needs more gigabytes. Drive for Education supports individual files up to 5TB in size.
How much space do you have on your MyIIT Google Drive? If your answer was anything less than infinite, you were wrong. According to an announcement yesterday on the Google for Education Blog, Drive for Education is available to all Google Apps for Education accounts at no charge and will include:
- Unlimited storage: No more worrying about how much space you have left or about which user needs more gigabytes. Drive for Education supports individual files up to 5TB in size and will be available in coming weeks.
- Vault: Google Apps Vault, Google’s solution for search and discovery for compliance needs, will be coming free to all Apps for Education users by the end of the year.
- Enhanced Auditing: Reporting and auditing tools and an Audit API easily let you see the activity of a file, are also on the way.
Our own Information Technology and Management Organization challenges IIT students to learn, build and create cloud infrastructure and applications in an event they have named IIT on da Cloud. In this four-day event open to all students at IIT, students can learn about cloud computing, build the infrastructure of a private cloud, and create applications that can run on it. 
Recently, cloud computing has been used as a popular marketing term to attract a target market, which has led to many misconceptions and misunderstandings about what cloud computing actually is. ITMO’s goal is to help educate students about cloud computing and give them hands-on experience using this technology. Rumor has it that there may be a team competitive aspect to the event! For more information and to register, visit the IIT on da Cloud website at http://itm.iit.edu/iitCloud/.
Microsoft has announced the release of Typescript, a superset of Javascript, which they say will better allow developers to build large applications and will provide better support for large teams, especially when building server- and cloud-side applications. It was released under an Apache 2.0 open-source license.
TypeScript Website: http://www.typescriptlang.org/
ZDNet article: http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-takes-the-wraps-off-typescript-a-superset-of-javascript-7000004993/?s_cid=e550
Image: Black Man Working at his Desk Cartoon Vector.svg from Wikimedia Commons by Videoplasty.com, CC-BY-SA 4.0