4/4/2006
4/4/2006
CT News Update:
An Online Newsletter from Campus Technology
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SPONSORS
* The Leaders in e-Learning Have Something in Common
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=25093
* Webinar: The Art of an RFP - An Email and Messaging Security Case Study
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=25095
* Campus Technology 2006: Learn From Peers to Make Change Happen
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=25139
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News for Tuesday, April 4, 2006
1] Carnegie Mellon Inaugurates Department of Machine Learning
2] Harvard, Berkeley Study: Phishing Victims Missing the Boat
3] U.S. News Rankings: MIT Tops, Followed by the Usual Suspects
4] Rensselaer 1998 Grad Endows Quarter-Million Dollar Fellowship
5] Contracts, Deals, Awards in Higher Education
6] MIT Media Labs Device Signals if You Are Being Annoying
7] ONLINE RESOURCES
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Sponsored by: Respondus
The Leaders in e-Learning Have Something in Common
Why do the leaders in e-Learning use Respondus software to increase faculty adoption of course management systems?
Because it works.
- Respondus 3 - Create and convert online assessments.
- StudyMate 1.5 - Create Flash-based games and activities.
- Respondus LockDown Browser - A secure environment for taking tests
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=25093
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1] Carnegie Mellon Inaugurates Department of Machine Learning
Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science is re-christening its Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (CALD) as the Department of Machine Learning to recognize advances in the science of machine learning and its significance to computer vision, speech recognition, and data mining. Tom M. Mitchell, the Fredkin Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Learning, heads the department. It is the first to offer a Ph.D. in the field of machine learning.
The roots of machine learning extend back almost 50 years, when a few researchers began to explore whether it was possible to develop software that could improve its performance by learning from experience. In speech recognition systems, for instance, machine learning has proven to be vital not only for initially training the system to understand the spoken word, but also for customizing each system to respond to the speech patterns of individual users. "The niche where machine learning will be used is growing rapidly as applications grow in complexity and as we develop more accurate learning algorithms," Mitchell said.
"The transition from the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery to the Machine Learning Department recognizes the emergence of machine learning as a rigorous academic discipline,” said Randal Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science. Bryant added that the discipline had “fostered especially strong ties between the School of Computer Science and the Statistics Department, providing computer scientists with more rigorous mathematical tools, and statisticians with new challenges and opportunities."
For more information, visit
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/ml/ml.html
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Sponsored by: Mirapoint
Webinar: The Art of an RFP - An Email and Messaging Security Case Study
In the world of higher education, there's no doubt that the Request for Proposal, or RFP, is key to getting the best technology solution for the best price. But what are the steps to writing an RFP? Attend this webinar to learn best-practice processes for soliciting bids and the important components to include in an RFP. Moderator Matt Villano, senior contributing editor at Campus Technology, will demonstrate the finer points of RFPs by focusing on Baker College and its recent RFP for a secure messaging service with e-mail security vendor Mirapoint. Takeaways for listeners will include checklists of essential ingredients, scoring strategies and recommendations for writing the best RFPs on the market today.
The webinar will take place on April 5, 2006, at 11 a.m. PST.
For more information, or to register for this event, please visit:
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=25095
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2] Harvard, Berkeley Study: Phishing Victims Missing the Boat
Researchers from Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley have found that the high rate at which people are tricked by email-based “phishing” attacks is due mainly to the fact that many users still don’t comprehend the most basic Internet security warnings and precautions.
Rachna Dhamija at Harvard and J.D. Tygar and Marti Hearst at Berkeley, writing in a paper called “Why Phishing Works,” said they analyzed a large set of captured phishing attacks and developed hypotheses about the types of users that are vulnerable to the attack strategies. Then they assessed their hypotheses in a study that asked 22 people to look at 20 Web sites and asked them to determine which ones were fraudulent.
“We found that 23 percent of the participants did not look at browser-based cues such as the address bar, status bar and the security indicators, leading to incorrect choices 40 percent of the time,” the researchers wrote. “We also found that some visual deception attacks can fool even the most sophisticated users. These results illustrate that standard security indicators are not effective for a substantial fraction of users, and suggest that alternative approaches are needed. ”
The researchers also found the best phishing site was able to fool more than 90 percent of participants. Pop-up warnings about fraudulent certificates also proved ineffective with 15 out of 22 participants.
To download the paper, visit: http://people.deas.harvard.edu/~rachna/papers/why_phishing_works.pdf
3] U.S. News Rankings: MIT Tops, Followed by the Usual Suspects
It’s that time of year again. U.S. News & World Report has released its annual rankings of higher education institutions. Most of the usual suspects held rank, proving once again how difficult it is to dislodge an incumbent, whether that’s a brand, a politician, or a group of dedicated trustees.
According to the magazine, the top graduate departments of engineering are located in these schools in declining order: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University, the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California, and the California Institute of Technology.
The top four graduate departments in computer engineering are located at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of California at Berkeley. The top graduate electronic and communications engineering programs can be found at MIT, Stanford and U.C. Berkeley.
For more information, visit http://www.usnews.com/usnews/home.htm
4] Rensselaer 1998 Grad Endows Quarter-Million Dollar Fellowship
Ajit Prabhu, who earned 1998 masters degree in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic University, announced he would contribute $250,000 to the school’s endowment. Interest from the gift will fund fellowships to support master’s and doctoral degree candidates, with a preference for those studying biomedical engineering.
Prabhe is now chief executive officer of QuEST, a provider of product development and engineering to companies in the aerospace, automotive, energy, and industrial products fields. He also earned a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Old Dominion University, Virginia, and a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Karnataka University, India.
"Hailing from a small town in India, born and brought up in a middle-class family, going to America for education in itself was a dream,” said Prabhe.
For more information, visit
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/mar312006/update920302006331.asp
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Sponsored by:
Campus Technology 2006: Learn From Peers to Make Change Happen
Join your peers this summer in Boston and discover how to make change happen on your campus. Cross-departmental, as well as cross-institutional, teams of presenters will give you valuable insight into how they tackled a problem, solved it, and drove change throughout their department, campus or system. Explore 10 cluster topics, ranging from mobility to funding, security to eLearning frontiers. Preconference workshops include a “technology insider” field trip to MIT.
For more information, go to: http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=25139
Complete details online.
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5] Contracts, Deals, Awards in Higher Education
>>> The University of Minnesota, which serves 60,000 students on five campuses, is consolidating its storage resources onto a single high-performance storage area network, or SAN. "It's a typical story for university environments," said Carl Follstad, manager of data management services at the university. "We had a lot of little islands of storage, perfectly reliable, but not scalable. There were also requirements for information-sharing between systems that couldn't be met because they were not connected. The next natural step was to consolidate storage onto a SAN."
The university is using Cisco Inc. fabric switches and directors to build the storage area network. The new environment hosts 300 terabytes of storage, 300 ports, and 60 hosts all interconnected by Fibre Channel technology. Hosted data can include anything from student content and materials, data warehouses, and imaging applications to production and research databases.
For more information visit
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps5023/products_case_study0900aecd802b1d7f.shtml
>>> Tulane University’s Center for Applied Environmental Public Health extended its license for LearnLinc virtual classroom. The center currently offers two to three courses each night, four nights a week, three semesters a year through the virtual classroom from iLinc Communications. With the company’s support, the center was able to get its distance learning network back online within weeks of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
To learn more, visit
http://interestalert.com/story/siteia.shtml?Story=st/sn/03280000aaa01351.prn&Sys=siteia&Fid=EDUCATIO&Type=News&Filter=Education
>>> Duke University has joined the Open Student Television Network (OSTN), which offers collegiate television programming over a nationwide network of campus affiliates. OSTN currently runs programming ranging from morning talk shows like "Good Morning Emerson" from ECTV at Emerson College, soap operas like "Ivory Tower" from HRTV at Harvard University, and dating shows like "Blind Date" from YTV at Yale University.
OSTN uses Abilene -- Internet2's nationwide high-speed backbone network -- to deliver OSTN student-produced programming to Internet2's 3 million users at 208 campuses and 34 state education networks. As an Internet2 member, Duke University can receive OSTN programming from the Abilene network.
For more information, visit http://www.ostn.tv
6] MIT Media Labs Device Signals if You Are Being Annoying
MIT's Media Lab researchers are working on a computer-based prosthetic device that can let you know if you are boring people. The Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic Device was developed to help people with autism keep track of how they are being received by those around them. The device was created to help ease the discomfort that autistic people feel when those around them suddenly become annoyed or want to leave. Some people with autism struggle by being unable to pick up signals from people showing boredom or confusion.
The device is a camera, small enough to be attached to a pair of glasses, that is attached to a hand-held computer. The computer runs software that recognizes images and the emotions that those images suggest. In a recent test, the software was demonstrated to show whether a person was agreeing, disagreeing, concentrating, or showing disinterest, from only a few seconds of video footage. When someone you are talking to is acting bored or disinterested, the computer would vibrate, letting the camera-wearer know an emotional change is occurring in the other person.
For more information visit:
http://affect.media.mit.edu/projectpages/esp/
7 ] ONLINE RESOURCES
Webinar: The Art of an RFP – An Email and Messaging Security Case Study Sponsored by Mirapoint
http://info.101com.com/default.aspx?id=25117
More resources
http://www.campus-technology.com/resources/index.asp
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Campus Technology 2006
July 31-August 3
Boston, MA
http://www.campustechnology.com/conf
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY is the only monthly publication focusing exclusively on the use of technology across all areas of higher education. CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY serves as a complete resource for administrative and academic IT leaders and provides in-depth, aggressive coverage of specific technologies, their uses and implementations on campus. Featured topics include advanced networking, administrative systems, portals, security, electronic publishing, communication solutions, presentation technologies, course management systems, technology infrastructure, and strategic IT planning - all the important issues and trends for campus IT decision-makers.
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Copyright 2006 101communications LLC. Campus Technology
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