Students enrolled in IIT School of Applied Technology’s Embedded Systems and Reconfigurable Logic Design course (ITMT 492/593) gave their final project presentations on Tuesday, December 2 in The McCormick Tribune Campus Center Auditorium. The course, taught by faculty members Jeremy Hajek and Dan Tomal, focused on students working on projects designed to solve real-world problems using a range of technical solutions.

Each presentation was technically focused and included a demonstration. Afterward, the projects were available for viewing, and audience members were able to interact with the students and the projects. The student projects included:

Wearable Home Automation Framework
Bart Dworak (ITM), Sydney Hardwick (ITM), Eduardo Villanueva (ITM), Olivia Minton (ITM)

Building a Smart Home
Colin Redmond (ITM), Dean Nelson (ITM), Brian Curtis (ITM), Awa Ka (ITM)

Following Mirror
Cheol-won Seo (ITM), Kyeongmin Kang (ITM), Jusung Mun (ITM)

RFID ID Reader for Class Presence
Bianca Canalli Zagueto (INTM), Josmar Baruffaldi Cristello (MMAE), Javier Moreno Valdecantos (ITM)

Mobile Flood Prediction System
Alysson Gustavo Andrade Souza (CS), Luiz Mariano Pinto (MMAE), Israel Aries Candido (ECE)

Automotive Media Center with Real-Time GPS Tracking
Clint Bhola (ITM)

Let Me Show You The Future—Internet of Things Networking
Jeremy Hajek (Industry Associate Professor ITM department)

See the complete story and more pictures

The Information Technology and Management (ITM) program in the School of Applied Technology seeks to work with other programs, integrating efforts and producing cross-curricular project results. Frameworks for additional research possibilities will result, enabling researchers and departments to learn and grow together.

Learn more about the embedded systems student presentations and demonstrations by clicking here. Learn more about additional ITM student projects at this link.

Pictured above Bob Carlson, Dean, IIT School of Applied Technology, far right, reviews the Mobile Flood Prediction System.

Pictured above Dean Nelson (ITM) left side, Colin Redmond (ITM), and Awa Ka (ITM) demonstrate Home Automation – Building a Smart Home Using openHAB.

Three IIT ITM student research papers are being presented at the 3rd annual Association for Computing Machinery’s Research in Information Technology conference, being held October 15-18, 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia in conjunction with the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education. IIT student papers “Printer Water-Mark Obfuscation” by Maya Embar, Louis McHugh, and William Wesselman; “Probabilistically Detecting Steganography withinMP3 Files” by Ben Khodja; and “Passive Warden Using Statistical Steganalysis” by David Stacey will be presented in the Friday morning RIIT session, which will be chaired by Industry Professor Ray Trygstad, Associate Chair of IIT’s Department of Information Technology and Management. Also attending the conference will be Dr. C. Robert Carlson, Dean of the IIT School of Applied Technology.

At last year’s RIIT conference in Orlando, Dean Carlson, along with Dr. Sargon Hasso, a former PhD student of Dr. Carlson’s, presented the paper “Design Patterns as First-Class Connectors” which was awarded the Best Paper award from the conference. Also presenting at the 2013 conference were IIT alumnus Mikhail Zaturenskiy, “MP3 Files as a Steganography Medium,” and IIT ITM alumnus Fernando Seror Garcia, “DNS (Do Not Suspect).”

Congratulations to all of our students presenting this year and thanks as well to all of those ITM students who submitted their research for consideration for the conference.

Ray Trygstad, Associate Chair of the IIT Department of Information Technology and Management, was interviewed and quoted in 2 articles about the shortage of workers with cybersecurity skills and IIT’s Master of Cyber Forensics and Security program to Medill Reports Chicago.

Shortage of workers with cybersecurity skills rises just as need does

Chicago’s tech jobs are growing – but the number of graduates isn’t keeping up

ITMO is holding its second annual IIT on da Cloud event this Friday, October 25 from 12:00 to 9:00pm (open to all IIT students).

The event features guest speakers who will talk about cloud computing and how it is used. At 2:00 the event will relocate to the IdeaShop for a night of setting up full cloud systems and developing apps to run on this cloud.

Check out the event: https://www.eventbrite.com/event/8947216365
Check out the HackNight: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/8977095735/eorg

Dr. Carlson and Dr. Hasso receiving the Best Paper award

Dr. C. Robert Carlson, Dean of the School of Applied Technology, earned the best paper award at the 2nd Annual Conference on Research in Information Technology (RIIT) held in conjunction with the ACM 14th Annual Conference in Information Technology Education (SIGITE), October 10-12. Dr. Carlson, along with Dr. Sargon Hasso, a former PhD student of Dr. Carlson’s, presented the paper “Design Patterns as First-Class Connectors” in the Software Development track. Their approach is a compositional model based on design patterns by abstracting their behavioral model using role modeling constructs. They demonstrated their technique by presenting a simple case study complete with design and implementation code. Dr. Hasso is currently employed at Wolters Kluwer.

Dr. Carlson was accompanied to the conference by Industry Professor Ray Trygstad, Associate Chair of IIT’s Department of Information Technology and Management. Professor Trygstad also serves as the Chair of the National Board of Directors for Gamma Nu Eta, the National Information Technology Honor Society. He represented Gamma Nu Eta, who was a Silver Sponsor for the conference.

Dr. Carlson also served as Session Chair for the presentations of “Leveraging HCI in Teaching Mobile, ‘Anywhere and Everywhere’ IT” and “Flipping the Classroom – Is it for you?” as part of the Mobile IT Technology track of the conference.

IIT alumnus Fernando Seror Garcia at the Poster Session

As part of the Security 1 track, IIT alumnus Mikhail Zaturenskiy, who worked with Professor Bill Lidinsky, presented his paper “MP3 Files as a Steganography Medium.” This paper looks at ways to hide information inside MP3 files and proposes four largely unexplored techniques: unused header bit stuffing, unused side information bit stuffing, empty frame stuffing, and ancillary bit stuffing.

As part of the RIIT Poster Session, IIT 2013 ITM alumnus Fernando Seror Garcia, presented his project, “DNS (Do Not Suspect).” The purpose of this project is to see if it would be possible for an attacker to use the DNS protocol to communicate with a bot of his own in an infected host in order to avoid being detected.

IIT’s Ray Trygstad will be a panelist in the Technology Executives Club “Selling to IT” event. The event will be held at IIT’s Rice Campus on Thursday, July 25. Details at http://www.technologyexecutivesclub.com/vendors/events/july2013selltoit.php

Timing is everything, and students focusing on Information Technology and Management seem to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to take advantage of significant growth in cloud computing jobs.

7 Million New Cloud Computing Jobs by 2015

According to a Forbes review of an IDC report, sponsored by Microsoft, demand for “cloud-ready” IT workers will “grow by 26% annually through 2015. IDC expects that as many as 7 million new cloud-related jobs will be available worldwide by that time”. The author of the IDC report (Cushing Anderson) says that “Unlike IT skill shortages in the past, solving this skills gap is extremely challenging, given that cloud brings a new set of skills, which haven’t been needed in the past.”

Cloud-Related Positions Going Unfilled

According to the Forbes article, “lack of training, certification or experience” are the top three reasons cloud positions go un-filled. Anderson says several skill sets are key to building and maintaining cloud capabilities within organizations. These are listed in the table below, along with projected openings for 2015:

From IDC Report as Reported in Forbes 12/21/2012

In an earlier article Forbes’ writer Joe McKendrick suggested what IT professionals (future and present) should be learning in order to succeed in cloud-related jobs. His list seems to be right in line with the IDC report:

• Business and financial skills: Know how to make a business case and calculate an ROI for cloud.
• Technical skills: Java, .NET framework skills and knowledge of virtualization are important, and familiarity with open-source tools and languages is also valuable.
• Enterprise architecture and business needs analysis: Be able to build a “roadmap” for which services should be provided by IT and which by an outside provider. Learn to speak the language of business as well as the language of IT professionals
• Project management skills: Managing scope “creep”, contracts, service agreements and risk exposure are just some of the project management skills critical to implementing cloud. Cloud computing can cause end users to “run wild” with feature and service requests, so scope has to be contained. Also, remembering that cloud is supposed to cost less than equivalent on-premises services, skills in negotiating cloud vendors’ contracts, service level agreements and availability are critical to success.
• Security and compliance: Understanding security protocols is important in all types of cloud deployment. Additionally, regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA have made navigating data-handling laws more complex. IT professionals with an understanding of both can be very valuable.
• Data integration and analysis skills: Inside we have ERP systems, data warehouses, etc. Outside we have cloud-based services. Those who can analyze both sides and implement sound data integration between the two will be in high demand.
• Mobile app development and management: The rise of mobile devices of all kinds has been key driver for the expansion of cloud solutions. A sound understanding of the basics is a valuable skill in cloud-implementation.

So how does the future look for those with a solid grounding in Cloud, Information Technology, and Management? All in all, it looks anything but cloudy.

References:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/12/21/almost-1-7-million-cloud-related-jobs-went-unfilled-in-2012-estimate/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/08/27/the-8-most-important-skills-needed-for-cloud-computing-today/

Students in IIT’s Business Innovation class (ITM 582) got an entrepreneurial experience in a recent “Pitch Contest” that was organized by Professor Praveen Gupta. His students presented their final projects to a panel of outside judges who ranked the ideas based on merit, effectiveness, clarity, and completeness of the student presentation. The students were very innovative with ideas that included a braille platform to help blind people use iPads, solar cell phones, a phone app to detect cavities, cloud-based television and others. See the video at http://youtu.be/sIm-rQS-MJM

Gamma Nu Eta invites you to a Halloween Party at The Bog on Friday, November 2 from 8 pm – 1 am. It is free and and open to ALL IIT students. It is a costume party and it includes free food and non-alcoholic beverages (there is a cash bar). There are prizes for the best costumes. Sponsored by Gamma Nu Eta, BOG Events Fund & SAF. Questions – ubbogvp@gmail.com. (Photos are now on Facebook…)

Oh, be real!