Fall 2015 will bring some changes to the ITM curriculum. ITMD 461, Internet Technologies and Web Design will be replaced by ITMD 361, Fundamentals of Web Development. The content of the course is essentially unchanged, but the new title and course description reflects the fact that the extended discussions of Internet technologies and design that were originally included in the course are no longer covered. The design component will move to another new course, ITMD 362, Human-Computer Interaction and Web Design, which will replace ITMD 434, Human-Computer Interaction. This restores the Web design component formerly included in ITMD 461, moves the HCI component formerly in ITMD 434 from a full semester to 9 weeks, and allows students to apply their new HCI knowledge through hands-on project-based learning. The first offering of ITMD 362 is planned for Spring 2016.

Additionally two new minors are offered in ITM to prepare students in other majors to be admitted to our graduate programs. The Information Technology Foundations minor prepares students to enter the Master of Information Technology and Management degree, and the Cyber Security Foundations minor will prepare students to enter the Master of Cyber Forensics and Security degree. The existing minor in Information System Administration has had a major revision to incorporate current courses and is now one of our strongest minors. Let your friends in other majors know about these!

See the Curriculum Revision document for full details!

A new ITM Graduate curriculum has been approved by the university and will be effective as of the Spring term, 2015. This has been the result of hard work on the part of the Department Curriculum Committee to create a curriculum that provides clearer guidance to students and has maximum focus and relevance to ensure students are well prepared for their selected career options. The ITM Bulletin excerpt containing the new curriculum is available here at MITM/MCFS Bulletin 2016-2018 approved – Effective Spring 2015.

IIT Information Technology and Management students recently presented and demonstrated their fall 2014 real-time communications projects to a group of communications professionals. Students were challenged to conduct research, and to test and deploy solutions as part of the project-based learning approach at IIT School of Applied Technology. Unlike a final exam, these students had to provide a working system and defend it in front of an audience of industry professionals—some with 30 years of experience.

Presentations included:

• The Gateway Project—A gateway SIP proxy interconnects the lab test beds enabling mobile calls to flow through to our NG911 test bed, voice-over IIT system, and WebRTC environment. (Student–Cruz Tovar)
• NG9-1-1: Performance Testing, a Production-Ready NG-911 System for the Counties of Southern Illinois—Our Emergency Services IP Network (ESINet) is used by the National Emergency Numbers Association to test the interoperability of elements of the ESINet architecture. Students supported the setup and testing, and also did performance tests for early adopters of the new technology. Both types of testing were described. (Student–Bart Dworak)
• Non-Repudiation of Voice-Over-SIP Conversations (Student–Yango A. Colmenares)
• VoIIT Project v2: Building a VoIIT Test Bed Using FreeSWITCH (Students–Nkechi Ijeh and Shefali Verma)
• SIP: SIP Performance Benchmarks—Automated Application of a SIP Performance Test Methodology to Various SIP Proxies: Results and Their Analyses. (Students–Yueqing Zhang, Arthur Clouet, and Oluseyi S. Awotayo)
• SIP Mobility—OpenBTS, a SIP-based cellular-phone system, was demonstrated, and its architecture, behavior, and use was described. (Student Adesola Ayodele)

See the complete story and pictures

IIT has two real-time communications labs, one at the Rice Campus in Wheaton and the other at IIT Main Campus. Learn more about the real-time communications labs by clicking here.

Here are the Spring 2015 ITM Undergraduate Advising Notes! Undergrads should read through these before meeting with your adviser.
https://blogs.iit.edu/itm_loopback/files/2014/10/Spring2015ITMUndergraduateAdvisingNotes.pdf

ITM students Bill Wesselman and Maya Embar display their award for ACM RIIT 2014 Best Paper.

The Best Paper Award at the 3rd annual Association for Computing Machinery’s Research in Information Technology conference was won this year by the IIT ITM student team of Maya Embar, Louis McHugh, and William Wesselman for their paper “Printer Water-Mark Obfuscation”. Also presenting at the conference was ITM student Ben Khodja ( “Probabilistically Detecting Steganography withinMP3 Files” ) and ITM alumnus David Stacey (“Passive Warden Using Statistical Steganalysis”). The IIT papers were presented at a session chaired by Industry Professor Ray Trygstad, Associate Chair of IIT’s Department of Information Technology and Management. The RIIT conference was held in conjunction with the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education, October 15-18, 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia. Congratulations to Maya, Louis, and Bill for this recognition of their accomplishment.

This is the second year that an IIT paper has won the Best Paper award at RIIT. At last year’s RIIT conference in Orlando, Dr. C. Robert Carlson, Dean of the IIT School of Applied Technology, along with Dr. Sargon Hasso, a former PhD student of Dr. Carlson’s, won the award for their paper “Design Patterns as First-Class Connectors”.

Frustrated with the same old questions, Professor David Lydic rips open his shirt in the middle of class…

Dr. Lisa Wade, writing in the Sociological Images blog, pretty much nails things college professors hate: Professors’ Pet Peeves. And of course, all of your faculty are tempted every term to follow the lead of David Lydic of Austin Community College as shown in the picture at the right… Anyway, if you take heed of Dr. Wade’s cogent advice, we can all have a more pleasant semester!

New Members of IIT’s Beta Chapter of Gamma Nu Eta, the National Information Technology Honor Society, were inducted on Monday, August 26th, 2013. Pictured above are Lei Zhang MITM; Industry Professor Ray Trygstad, Beta Chapter Adviser and ΓNH Professional Member; Srissa Dharampal MITM; Jeremy Stell ’14; Ziena Abdul-Samad ’15; Adjunct Industry Associate Professor Madeleine England ’11 MITM ’12, Beta Chapter Administrator and Past President; Brian Bailey MITM; Bartlomiej A. Dworak ’15; Ilo Miladinoski ’13; Michael Meier ’14; Justin Callanan ’14; Annie Ross MITM; Amulya N. Pothapragada MITM; René Tapia ’12 MITM; Ye Li MITM; Kumaran Ramanujam MITM; and Professor Bob Carlson, Dean of the IIT School of Applied Technology and ΓNH Professional Member.
Not pictured: Mark Adams ’13.

The Induction Ceremony took place in the Ballroom of IIT’s McCormick Tribune Campus Center, Chicago, Illinois. A reception followed the ceremony. Photos of the ceremony are available on the SAT Facebook page.

Undergraduates in the Bachelor of Information Technology and Management degree can now complete a graduate degree simultaneously with their undergraduate degree, while maintaining their undergraduate status (and undergraduate financial aid!) In most normal circumstances, students can complete both degrees in five years of study, or in three years for many transfer students. To be eligible for the Co-Terminal Degree Program, students must:

• be a full-time Undergraduate student at IIT
• have completed at least 3 semesters as a full-time Undergraduate student or have 60 or more credit hours of Undergraduate course-work
• have a minimum Undergraduate GPA of 3.25
  (This means that transfer students may not apply until during their second term at IIT and cannot commence their graduate studies until their third term)

The degree combinations currently available under this program are:

• Bachelor of Information Technology and Management and Master of Cyber Forensics and Security
• Bachelor of Information Technology and Management and Master of Information Technology and Management

We have a course matrix showing a sample program of study for each option. You may note that three courses are counted towards both the undergraduate and graduate degrees; in the BITM to MITM, they are all required undergraduate courses, but in the BITM to MCFS, there are some specific undergraduate electives that must be taken. For more details please see the Co-Terminal Degree information page at https://www.iit.edu/academics/undergraduate-programs/accelerated-masters-program. To apply for the program, log in to the my.iit.edu portal, select the Academics tab and navigate to the Graduate Admissions – Student channel, then select the IIT Co-Terminal Degree Program Application hyperlink, or just click on the link right here. Questions? Contact the ITM Associate Chair, Ray Trygstad: trygstad@iit.edu or 630.447.9009.

The Fall 2013 DRAFT ITM Course Schedule matrix is now available for download. This shows ITM live courses as they are currently scheduled. The full Fall 2013 IIT Course Schedule will be live on the Web on Monday, March 25, 2013, and registration will open for selected students on Monday, April 8, 2013.

In addition to the live courses and their corresponding online sections, there will be one online-only topics course on Mainframe Technologies which will include live labs on an IBM mainframe system. A new course for Fall is ITMO 417/ITMO 517, Shell Scripting for System Administration, which will be taught by Sam Shamsuddin. We will also be offering the UNIX sysadmin course, ITMO 452/ITMO 552, and for Grad students specializing in Systems Analysis, MIS and Data Management, Dean Oob Carlson will be teaching ITMT 531 Object Oriented System Analysis, Modeling and Design, a course you DO NOT want to miss out on. Also at the Rice Campus, we will be offering a Monday afternoon session of ITMS 448/ITMS 548 Cyber Security Technologies as well as the usual Wednesday evening section. ITMS 555 Mobile Device Forensics will run at Rice on Monday evenings. ITMS 443/ITMS 543 Vulnerability Analysis and Control (Ethical Hacking) will run on Tuesday evenings at Rice and will also run online with a requirement to attend the first class session live; we’ll work something out for transportation for Main Campus students for that session. Jeremy Hajek will teach ITMT 492 Embedded Systems and Reconfigurable Logic Design on Wednesday afternoons at Rice. At the Main Campus ITMO 456 Intro to Open Source Operating Systems (Linux+) will run as a live lab course on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons; this will be an acceptable substitute for ITM 302 which is not being offered. ITMO 455/ITMO 555 which will cover iOS development this term will run in the Idea Shop on Monday evenings. Noland Joiner, our authority on healthcare IT, will again teach the Introduction to Healthcare IT course on Thursday evenings. This is the prerequisite for a projected four additional graduate-level courses in Healthcare IT, so if you want to take those be sure to grab this class.

We expect to offer a late afternoon Rice Campus bus as well as the early afternoon bus we currently run, so students only doing an evening course at Rice can come out later. We are planning that both of the afternoon buses will also be available for students who want transportation direct to Main Campus from Rice, but there will be no late bus (after 9pm) returning to the Rice Campus.

Just a reminder…Friday January 25 is the last day to drop a class for a full refund and to add a class without “issues”.