The Information Technology and Management Faculty held their Spring 2018 faculty meeting at Lee Wing Wah in Chicago’s Chinatown on May 7, 2018. A highlight of the meeting was the awarding of the 2018 Jeffrey Kimont Memorial Teaching Award. Named in honor and memory of the first full-time ITM faculty member, the Jeffrey Kimont Memorial Teaching Award honors an outstanding adjunct faculty member. This year’s recipient is Vasilios “Billy” Pappademetriou. As the key instructor for ITM 301, Billy introduces every first-year ITM student into the fundamentals of not only hardware and operating systems but the IT profession as well.

Jeff Kimont was a founding faculty member in Information Technology and Management and shaped the application development curriculum of the program. A BSEE graduate of Midwest College of Engineering (now part of IIT and the foundation of the Rice Campus in Wheaton), Jeff earned his Master of Computer Science at North Central College and a Masters Certificate in Bioengineering and Bioinformatics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After retiring from Bell Labs, he became the first full-time faculty member in Information Technology and Management but later left that role to pursue a full-time career as a lead software developer. A jazz musician as well as a talented coder and teacher, Jeff was the father of four. He passed away due to cancer at the age of 58 in 2013.

Previous winners of the Jeffrey Kimont Memorial Teaching Award include Jason Lambert, Dennis Hood, and Shawn Davis. (Photo by Angie Jarka.)

Student Awards for Spring 2018 were presented at the ITM Student Awards Luncheon on May 7, 2018. The following awards were presented:

• Outstanding Master of Cyber Forensics and Security curriculum graduate: John Siergiej
• Outstanding Master of Information Technology and Management Computer & Information Security specialization graduate: Alexandre Florent Pierre Buisson-Chavot
• Outstanding Master of Information Technology and Management Data Management specialization graduate: Moein Mayeh
• Outstanding Master of Information Technology and Management Digital Systems Technology specialization graduate: Nour Al-Habash
• Outstanding Master of Information Technology and Management IT Management & Entrepreneurship specialization graduate: Gabriel Garcia Ardiles
• Outstanding Master of Information Technology and Management Information Technology Infrastructure specialization graduate: Mohnish Anand
• Outstanding Master of Information Technology and Management Management Information Systems specialization graduate: Sumit Anand Asati
• Outstanding Master of Information Technology and Management Software Development specialization graduate: Harsh Jagdishkumar Patel
• Outstanding Master of Information Technology and Management Web Design & App Development specialization graduate: Christopher Montufar
• Outstanding Bachelor of Information Technology and Management First Year Student: Zachary Fleck
• Outstanding Bachelor of Information Technology and Management graduate completing the transfer curriculum: Jaina Parekh
• Outstanding Bachelor of Information Technology and Management graduate completing the First Year Student curriculum: Daniel Kolodziej

Congratulations to these outstanding graduates. The awardees received a framed certificate and a medallion to be worn with their cap and gown at commencement.

Graduate, undergraduate, and women’s scholarships are offered by the Center for Cyber Safety and Education of the International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC)². They will begin accepting applications on February 28, 2017 for graduate and undergraduate scholarships of up to $5,000, and are currently accepting applications for women’s scholarships of $8,000 or more. One undergraduate student may also be selected for the Harold F. Tipton Memorial Scholarship; the most recent award recipient for this scholarship is Kyle Dean Murbach from Wheaton, IL. Please see the (ISC)² scholarship page at https://www.isc2cares.org/Scholarships/ for full details.

ITM is happy to be in Boston! In the photo at right, Master of Cyber Forensics and Security alumnus Anthony Ramirez receives the Best Paper Award for the 2016 ACM Research in Information Technology (RIIT) conference in Boston. Anthony and Alfedo Fernandez earned this award for their paper MP3 Stegonography: Analyzing and Detecting TCSteg. This is the third time in five years that Illinois Tech Information Technology and Management researchers have received this award. The School of Applied Technology and the ITM Department are Silver Sponsors for the RIIT conference and the concurrent ACM Special Interest Group in Information Technology Education (SIGITE) conference. ITM Associate Chair Ray Trygstad serves on the SIGITE Executive Committee.

The Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC) of ABET recently completed its assessment of the Bachelor of Information Technology and Management Program within the School of Applied Technology at Illinois Tech and has accredited the program. ITM is the first ABET-accredited Information Technology program in Illinois. Full details of the accreditation and the meaning for ITM undergrads is at https://appliedtech.iit.edu/news/2016/sep/08/information-technology-and-management-program-itm-illinois-tech-earns-abet. Our accreditation dates from October 2014. Thus, everyone who has received the Bachelor of Information Technology and Management (BITM) degree since December 2014 is now a graduate of an ABET-accredited program.

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”.

Fifty for the Future honoree Zeina Abdul Samad

Congratulations to three IIT students who have been selected to receive the 2013 Fifty For The Future® award from the Illinois Technology Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the development of the technology talent pipeline in the State of Illinois.

First-year ITM undergraduate, Eric Tendian, was nominated by ITM Adjunct Industry Professor, Bill Slater. ITM undergraduate Zeina Abdul Samad was nominated by ITM Industry Professor Ray Trygstad. The third IIT recipient is a Computer Science graduate student, Scott Krieder.

Each student, as well as the faculty member who nominated him/her will receive a $1000 scholarship to Directions Training’s extensive catalog of offerings.

The Fifty For The Future® Celebration is attended by information technology executives, industry leaders, judges, Foundation sponsors and other supporters of the technology industry. The students will receive their awards at the 7th Annual Celebration event November 12 at the Chicago Cultural Center.

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.

Dr. Gregory N. Hughes of RPI is inducted into Gamma Nu Eta by Bill Wesselman, IIT Beta Chapter president

The 2013 National Conference of Gamma Nu Eta, the National Information Technology Honor Society, was hosted by IIT’s School of Applied Technology on April 5th through the 7th. Industry Professor of Information Technology and Management Ray Trygstad is the Chair of the ΓNH National Board of Directors and the Adviser of IIT’s Beta Chapter. IIT Beta Chapter’s Charter President, Madeleine England–who now serves as the Chapter Administrator–and Beta Chapter President Bill Wesselman are also members of the National Board of Gamma Nu Eta. During the meeting, Bill Wesselman inducted Dr. Gregory N. Hughes, founder of the information technology degree program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, as a Professional Member of IIT’s Beta Chapter of Gamma Nu Eta. Prior to his appointment as the first Vice Provost for Information Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Dr. Hughes had a distinguished career as a senior executive at AT&T/Lucent Technologies, and as President of AT&T’s Transmission Systems Business he received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award from President George Bush.

Congratulations to IIT’s School of Applied Technology students for their award winning IPROs, student projects, and completion of final exams. We wish you a happy and safe holiday season and look forward to seeing you when classes begin on January 9th.

— C. Robert Carlson, Dean of IIT’s School of Applied Technology