College of Computing Magazine 2022

College of Computing Magazine

Dean,

Chief

Associate

Director

Editor

WELCOMEto the second issue of Illinois Tech’s College of Computing Magazine .

It’s been an exciting sophomore year for the college. We completed our strategic plan with the help of faculty, staff, and students and our advisory board consisting of alumni and local business leaders. We plan to focus on data science, cybersecurity, and the digital transformation of just about everything, from manufacturing and health care to money and space, as we focus on our three pillars: to play a leading role in education and research for the tech community in Chicago, to infuse computing across all of Illinois Tech’s disciplines, and to provide students from all backgrounds meaningful roles in a changing technological society.

You can find our full plan at iit.edu/computing/about, and I welcome any thoughts or suggestions that you may have.

Beyond creating our strategic plan, the college has started two major new programs. An undergraduate program in data science, a collaboration between the applied mathematics and computer science departments, recognizes the growing importance of data and analytics and provides students with the mathematical and computational foundations to work with data. Additionally, we have introduced a Master of Science in Financial Technology (fintech) that updates our earlier, successful mathematical finance program to incorporate the tools and technologies of today and the future.

Our next project will bring all of our cybersecurity programs under one umbrella—a single degree program that crosses multiple disciplines, including computer science, information technology and management, electrical and computer engineering, and the law. This program will take advantage of strengths across the university.

We have also welcomed four new faculty members, including two new tenure-track professors: Associate Professor Marwan Omar in the Department of Information Technology and Management, who specializes in cybersecurity, and Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics Ming Zhong, who works on scientific machine learning.

Last year we hosted the initial Grainger Computing Innovation Prize competition endowed by a generous gift from The Grainger Foundation. The winning team, GiGi, developed a cryptocurrency based on proof-of-space, which requires far less energy than the traditional proof-of-work used by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You can read more about the competition at iit.edu/graingerprize

I hope you enjoy reading this issue of the magazine and learning about the college’s many exciting activities and achievements. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you would like to know more about the college or have any questions or suggestions.

Lance Fortnow Dean College of Computing

Photography

Copyeditor Thaddeus Mast

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On the Cover

Jack Dongarra (M.S. CS ’73) was awarded the 2021 A. M. Turing Award for “major contributions of lasting importance” to the field of computing.

College of Computing Lance Fortnow

of Staff and Vice President for Strategy Jess Goode

Vice President Chelsea Kalberloh Jackson

of Content Andrew Wyder

Casey Moffitt Design Joe Goforth

Jamie Ceaser David Ettinger Michael Reiter

Letter from the Dean

contents

Faculty News

Learn more about our faculty’s latest research, grants, and awards.

Trailblazing Work

Jack Dongarra (M.S. CS ’73) earned the prestigious Turing Award for his pioneering work in high-performance computing.

Cybersecurity as a Global Concern

Maurice Dawson’s Fulbright Scholar Award took him to Botswana for cybersecurity research.

Student News

College of Computing students have engaged in innovation through award-winning research and competitions.

At Fintech's Frontier College of Computing is on the cutting edge of fintech research and talent development.

A Helping Hand

Vinesh Kannan (CS ’19) established Scarlet Data Studio to grant internship opportunities to current students.

Hood Earns Fulbright Award

A Fulbright United States Scholar Award will allow  Cynthia Hood , associate professor of computer science and engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, to seize an opportunity to undertake a professional and personal journey.

Hood will be traveling to Poznań University of Technology in Poland to collaborate with researchers at Institute of Radiocommunications at Poznań and Lviv Polytechnic National University in Ukraine.

“It’s a great opportunity, and I believe it will have a significant impact on my career and worldview,” Hood says. “I was really excited to get the news, and a bit nervous. This will be quite an adventure.”

Chicago; Lviv, Ukraine; and Poznań, Poland, like many cities around the world, have implemented information and

ACL Honors Pioneer Martha Evens

Martha Evens, professor emerita of computer science at Illinois Institute of Technology, dedicated her career to pushing the boundaries of natural language processing and to mentoring new generations of computer scientists and computational linguists. That dedication was feted by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award, bestowed on those whose work is widely recognized as providing sustained and enduring contributions to the field of computational linguistics over a long period, was presented to Evens during the ACL’s 60th annual meeting in Dublin. Evens says she was taken completely by surprise.

“I was so delighted,” she says. “I never thought this would happen, especially now since I’ve been out of research for so long.”

The ACL described Evens as a “path blazer” in the fields of lexical databases and intelligent tutoring systems for medical

students. She has authored more than 300 publications, and served as an adviser or co-adviser to more than 100 Ph.D. students.

“Everything she did, she did with intelligence, grace, humility, and for the greater good—truly an example to us all,” said Tim Baldwin, president of the ACL, during the presentation.

Evens’s work on CIRCSIMTutor, an intelligent tutoring system developed to help firstyear cardiovascular physiology students at Rush University diagnose heart conditions, was cited by the ACL as an example of her pioneering work. The computational system was developed by a team of accumulated researchers, and allowed small groups of students to ask questions through the computer and receive answers.

Evens earned her Ph.D.

communication technology to provide better services and quality of life to residents. Smart cities hold great promise, but to date the results have been mixed. Hood hopes her research will discover how technology can be used to improve resilience in smart cities.

This experience also will be a personal journey for Hood, who has familial roots in Poland and Ukraine.

“My paternal greatgrandparents immigrated to the United States from Poland and Ukraine, so this gives special meaning to these cultures for me, and I am even hoping to do some research on my own family history while I’m there,” she says.

The United States Department of State has established relationships with more than 160 countries through the Fulbright Program. It offers international educational and cultural experiences for students, scholars, artists, and teachers to study, teach, and conduct research.

in computer science at Northwestern University. A week after defending her thesis in 1975, she joined the faculty at Illinois Tech’s Department of Computer Science as its first member to hold a Ph.D. in computer science.

Bias in a News Bubble

Researchers at Illinois Institute of Technology are studying how algorithms recommending news stories can create filter bubbles. Learning how these algorithms work and how they affect readers is a crucial first step in understanding the consequences that can occur as people are drawn into these bubbles.

Mustafa Bilgic, associate professor of computer science, and Matthew Shapiro, professor of political science, published “The Interaction Between Political Typology and Filter Bubbles in News Filter Algorithms” with funding from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems.

The research team curated a collection of more than 900,000 news articles and opinion essays from 41 sources annotated by topic and partisan lean. A simulation investigated how different algorithmic strategies affect filter bubble formation.

The algorithms used collaborative filtering, which makes recommendations based on the preferences of people with similar views, or content filtering, which makes recommendations based on the

content in the articles.

The study shows content-based recommendations are susceptible to biases based on distinctive partisan language used on a given topic, leading to over-recommendation of the most polarizing topics. Collaborative filtering recommenders are susceptible to the majority opinion of users, leading to the most popular topics being recommended.

The researchers found that users with more extreme views were shown less diverse content and that they had the highest percentage of click rates. For users who have a mix of views, the recommending algorithms tended to pull them in one direction.

The research group plans to continue this research using human readers to see if viewing habits change if they can control the algorithms’ filtering effects.

“If we present people more information about how the algorithm is filtering news for them, and give them knobs to adjust the algorithm’s behavior, will people take it more to the extremes or will they read news articles with different views?” Bilgic asks.

Simulation results by political typology, showing click-through rate versus average document stance for three levels of randomness.

Although he was a renowned researcher, it was always important to him to have his research impact and inform classroom teachers’ practice and ultimately result in improving their students’ scientific literacy.”

—Judith Lederman on her late husband, Norman Lederman, who was awarded a Legacy Award by the National Science Teaching Association for his pioneering work in education research as director of the Mathematical and Science Education program at Illinois Tech

Rethinking COVID-19 Resource Models

Lulu Kang, associate professor of applied mathematics at Illinois Institute of Technology, teamed with researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago to develop a new resource allocation model that considers all the variables that sustain the spread of COVID-19.

The team published its findings in “Fair and

Diverse Allocation of Scarce Resources” in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, which puts a new twist on traditional resource allocation models to optimize the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, testing supplies, and other related resources.

“The traditional resource allocation focuses on even

coverage,” Kang says. “The goal is to make sure the resource per capita in an area—in a city, for instance—is the same throughout the area. But this traditional strategy is only applicable when the resource is abundant and there is no need to give priority to certain subgroups of the population.”

People’s risk to exposure

and susceptibility to the virus that causes COVID-19 can vary based on age, health conditions, income, race, and profession, among other factors.

The research team designed a fair-diverse allocation optimization framework. Based on geographic diversity and social group fairness, the framework aims to get these limited resources to the most vulnerable subgroups of the population while ensuring the allocation is independent of an individual’s demographic background, including race, ethnicity, or economic status.

The team’s resource allocation model tries to achieve a data-driven equilibrium.

“Our resource allocation tries to achieve an optimal balance between fairness and diversity, and this optimal balance or compromise is driven by the data,” Kang says.

team leader for the competition.

“Competitions are an important part of the CyberHawks activities as they provide our members with the chance to practice their cybersecurity skills against professional penetration testers without the high-stakes environment out in the field,” says David Arnold (EE ’19, M.S CPE ’19, Ph.D. CPE Candidate), president of CyberHawks.

CyberHawks Soar as National Champs

A team of students from Illinois Institute of Technology’s cybersecurity student organization CyberHawks topped 65 teams from 55 colleges and universities to win the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity Cyber Games National Championship with a recordbreaking score.

CyberHawks approached the competition with a methodical strategy

that included spending extra time creating robust defenses. This early trade-off became the key to its climb to victory as the team continued to gain a steady stream of points while other teams faltered.

“This competition was primarily focused on good teamwork and building up hands-on practical skills that would be beneficial in the real world,” says Sajeel Mehta (M.A.S. ITM 1st Year), who served as

At nationals, Illinois Tech’s team featured engineering and computing students, including Mehta, Aurélien Agniel (M.A.S. CYBS 1st Year), Mohammed Chisti (CS, M.A.S. CYF 5th Year), My Dinh (CS 5th Year), John Ford (CCSE, M.S. CPE 3rd Year), Sarah Hugue (M.A.S. CYBS 1st Year), Ryan Timothy Rishab (M.A.S. CYBS 1st Year), Kreetha Sintawee (M.A.S. CYF 1st Year), and Wyatt Stevens (CS 1st Year).

Faculty advisers include Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Erdal Oruklu, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Jia Wang, and Assistant Teaching Professor Won-Jae Yi.

Grainger Prize Spurs Innovation

Illinois Institute of Technology’s inaugural Grainger Computing Innovation Prize attracted 25 student research teams, with the $15,000 grand prize awarded to Team GiGi (Green lightnInG coIn) for developing a sustainable digital currency.

Team GiGi’s goal was to develop a digital currency that is not only more energy efficient, but also competes in speed with other centralized payment processing approaches.

“Our new digital currency, GiGi, increases transaction throughput through larger blocks with smaller block times and achieves energy efficiency on par with centralized solutions using an improved proof-of-space algorithm leveraging XSearch to secure the digital currency,” says Gabriel Bryk (CS 4th Year), Team GiGi leader.

The competitive field of research teams presented projects that range from smart devices to help make recycling easier and more accurate, technology addressing mental health access disparities for sexual violence survivors, modularized workplace safety implementation, and a smart waste compressor that aims to

improve the quality of life of residents in developing countries, along with GiGi.

Each team included students from a cross section of academic backgrounds, with the goal of encouraging diversity of thought, unique solutions, and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

“Computing naturally sits at the heart of solutions to today’s global problems,” says Lance Fortnow, dean of Illinois Tech’s College of Computing. “Placing computing at the center of the solution to these pressing problems represents a core goal of the establishment of the College of Computing here at Illinois Tech: computing and data infused into the core of our educational approach, across each discipline.”

A generous endowed gift funded by The Grainger Foundation supports the Grainger Computing Innovation Prize, which challenges Illinois Tech students to create technology solutions to some of the most pressing global challenges. Five student teams pitched their prototypes to a panel of esteemed judges, the Illinois Tech community, and invited guests as part of the finals.

Students Collect EuroSys Award

Student researchers guided by Kyle Hale, assistant professor of computer science, earned the Gilles Muller Best Artifact Award at the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys ’22) for their work on a software framework that enables easy isolation of

functions within applications.

“Isolating Functions at the Hardware Limit with Virtines” questions the idea that hardware virtualization is slow and impractical. Virtines does not require the use of specialized hardware and applies easy-to-use language extensions to make hardware virtualization more practical to use.

The Virtines platform executes virtualized functions while reducing the overhead of traditional environments by developing language extensions that require changing just a handful of words in code.

This allows users to isolate their applications in cloud computing, databases, thirdparty libraries, and serverless computing with ease.

The paper was written by Nicholas Wanninger (CS ’21), Joshua Bowden (CS/M.S. CS ’21), Kirtankumar Shetty (CS/M.S. CS 5th Year), and Ayush Garg (CS/M.S. CS 5th Year).

Virtines can function as a virtualization solution, but more research will be conducted to automatically synthesize lightweight runtime environments, to understand the security implications, and to support more high-level languages.

Finding Anonymous Extremists

Illinois Institute of Technology graduate students have published research examining whether extremists can be identified through anonymous online posts.

Andreas Vassilakos (ITM/M.A.S. CYF ’21) and Jose Luis Castanon Remy (M.A.S. ITM 2nd Year) published “Illicit Activities Beneath the Surface Web: Investigating Domestic Extremism on Anonymous Social Media Platforms” in HOLISTICA Journal of Business and Public Administration. Maurice Dawson, Illinois Tech assistant professor of information technology and management, and Tenace Kwaku Setor, assistant professor of information science and technology at the University of Nebraska Omaha, co-authored the paper.

The researchers collected and examined messages on platforms such as Reddit and 4chan, where anonymous extremist post their rants. They used open-source intelligence (OSINT) software to collect data from the posts.

“By combining OSINT and other machine learning tools, we can excavate information that can lead to valuable conclusions,” Vassilakos says.

Using tools such as Maltego, the researchers can examine IP addresses, MAC addresses, and mobile devices to unveil the poster’s identity.

Turing Award Presented to Illinois Tech Alumnus

Jack Dongarra

(M.S. CS ’73) jumped onto a Zoom meeting on March 1, 2022, after a colleague, Rodney Brooks, asked him to talk about Association for Computing Machinery business. When he logged on, it looked like he had walked into an ambush.

“There were nine other people on the Zoom, and I recognized many of them as leaders in the [computer science] field,” Dongarra says. “Rodney said they were members of the ACM Awards Committee and wanted to tell me that I was chosen as this year’s A. M. Turing Award recipient.”

The Turing Award often is referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing, and is the most prestigious award bestowed by ACM for major contributions of lasting importance to computing. ACM cited Dongarra’s pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries, which have enabled high-performance computational software to keep pace with more than 40 years of hardware improvements. The award also includes a $1 million prize funded by Google.

“It was quite a shock,” Dongarra says. “I know a number of previous winners. I’ve read their books. I used their theorems. My head is still spinning knowing that I’ve joined that group.”

Dongarra is the first to win the Turing Award for the field of high-performance computing. He says the award not only is a great personal achievement, but also is a great recognition by ACM of the field’s impact in computer science.

“HPC is a relatively new area of computer science,” he says. “Theory gets a lot of the recognition. To recognize that HPC is important to computer science is quite an honor.”

However, ACM could not ignore that Dongarra played a central part in directing the successful trajectory of the high-performance computing field.

“His trailblazing work stretches back to 1979, and he remains one of the foremost and actively engaged leaders in the HPC community. His career certainly exemplifies the Turing Award’s recognition of ‘major contributions of lasting importance,’” ACM President Gabriele Kotsis said in ACM’s announcement of the award

“This award recognizes another Illinois Tech alum that has changed the face of computing,” says Lance Fortnow, dean of Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Computing. “Building on the computer science and mathematical ideas he learned at Illinois Tech, Jack Dongarra led the development of LINPACK, a software package that helped supercomputers solve complex mathematical problems and set the stage for powering modern machine learning.”

Dongarra was born and raised in Chicago. When he enrolled at Chicago State University as an undergraduate student, he expected to graduate as a high school math or science teacher. It was during his last semester at Chicago State when he applied for a research position at Argonne National Laboratory. At Argonne he met researchers from Illinois Tech, who encouraged him to pursue a master’s degree in computer science at the university while he continued to conduct research at Argonne.

“Illinois Tech has a good, balanced education in computing,” he says. “The education I got there allowed me to work at national laboratories and universities, and do great things.”

Dongarra worked full-time at Argonne from 1980 until 1989, when he left to teach at University of Tennessee Knoxville and conduct research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dongarra says that he never considered the accolades that could accompany his pioneering work, especially the Turing Award.

“It never entered my mind,” he says. “It’s not something you can arrange, or even whisper to your friends.”

Dongarra, who currently sits on the Illinois Tech Computer Science Board of Advisors, specializes in linear algebra, a form of mathematics that underpins many of the most ambitious tasks in computer science, including a critical part of the modeling of many natural systems in physics, astrophysics, climatology, chemistry and biology, human systems in economics, psychology, social science, and engineering. Early in his career, he worked with researchers

at several American universities to develop LINPACK, an open source set of algorithms that help scientists across a wide range of disciplines to do their work. They benefit a wide range of users through their incorporation into software, including MATLAB, Maple, Wolfram Mathematica, GNU Octave, the R programming language, and SciPy, among others—the building blocks of engineering and scientific discoveries.

In the 1990s Dongarra and his colleagues used the LINPACK benchmark to measure the progress of supercomputers, and today there is fierce international competition to be included in the TOP500 list, which is published twice a year and lists the fastest computers in the world. Dongarra and his fellow researchers currently work with the fastest computer in the world, called Frontier, an HPE-built system at Oak Ridge.

“

Dongarra is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of several organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and ACM. He holds appointments at Tennessee, Oak Ridge, and the University of Manchester. He was awarded IEEE’s Sid Fernbach Award in 2004; was the recipient of the first IEEE Medal of Excellence in Scalable Computing in 2008; was the first recipient of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Special Interest Group on Supercomputing’s award for career achievement in 2010; was the recipient of the IEEE Charles Babbage Award in 2011; and received the ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award in 2013. In 2019 Dongarra received the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering, and in 2020 he received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award for leadership in the area of high-performance mathematical software.

Currently, Dongarra is professor emeritus of computer science at Tennessee and continues to conduct research in linear algebraic algorithms and software development in high-performance computing. He is participating in a $4 billion, seven-year U.S. Department of Energy research project in exascale computing, which includes more than 200 people conducting research for the Department of Energy.

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It was quite a shock. I know a number of previous winners. I’ve read their books. I used their theorems. My head is still spinning knowing that I’ve joined that group.”

—Jack Dongarra

merging financial technologies are disrupting the concepts of money, ownership, payments, and security in the digital economy, and Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Computing is at the forefront of harnessing these innovations.

Through research, education, and mentorship, College of Computing faculty and students are pushing Fintech’s boundaries.

The College of Computing is home to some of the nation’s top fintech researchers.

Matthew Dixon, associate professor of applied mathematics, was named 2022’s Buy-Side Quant of the Year by Risk.net, along with his research partner, Igor Halperin, vice president at Fidelity Investments’ Artificial Intelligence Asset Management Center of Excellence. Their research applies machine learning techniques to optimize retirement planning and other goal-based wealth management.

Dixon and Halperin developed “G-learning,” a probabilistic extension of Q-learning, which is a common reinforcementlearning algorithm. The pair first began collaborating on a textbook, Machine Learning in Finance: From Theory to Practice, and they continued to improve G-learning after the book was published.

“We both had misgivings about deep Q-learning for many financial applications, and [we] had faced quite a bit of pushback making our views public on this, which motivated us to pursue it further,” Dixon says. “The particular application of optimal consumption is an important one for the wealth management industry.”

Machine learning tools and techniques have been used in other fields of finance such as derivatives hedging and risk management, but not in the

area of retirement planning— specifically when deciding how to invest and how quickly those savings should be spent.

The retirement planning industry traditionally has been a conservative area of finance. Part of the challenge was taking machine learning tools and techniques and translating them into the language and financial modeling framework that allow practitioners to connect the benefits of machine learning to wealth management.

Dixon says the research could have far-reaching applications in financial planning—from when to buy a house, budgeting for college

tuition, choosing life insurance plans, and tax planning.

“The possibilities are frightening, and there are clear ethical boundaries that must be effective, given access to your health data, your social media data, your credit card data, and more,” Dixon says.

Other College of Computing fintech leaders include Igor Cialenco, professor of applied mathematics, whose contributions to the field earned him a term as chair of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group on Financial Mathematics and Engineering. Cialenco was

elected to the two-year post by his peers in the financial engineering community to provide leadership and to create an intellectual forum for SIAM members who are interested in mathematical finance. Other duties include developing and overseeing its programs and initiatives, as well as organizing the biennial SIAM Conference on Financial Mathematics and Engineering in 2023.

Sergey Nadtochiy, associate professor of applied mathematics, received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to conduct fintech research, and Yong Zheng, assistant professor

“

The finance industry is simply moving too quickly—there is a global shortage of fintech talent. It’s difficult for companies to find strong technology students who understand finance.”

—Matthew Dixon

of information technology and management, has been working with industry partners on fintech research.

Chicago is home to some of the world’s largest financial institutions and trading firms, which creates a large local appetite for trained fintech professionals. Dixon says this proximity to industry leaders is the critical ingredient to build inroads for partnerships and collaboration in research and educational opportunities.

Zheng received a grant from Chicago-based fintech firm Morningstar. Zheng and his research team will collaborate with Morningstar to develop

intelligent and effective solutions for financial portfolio optimization. A multi-objective optimization framework will be built considering expected returns, potential risks, and corresponding metrics in environmental, social, and governance standards. This framework will be realized through algorithm development, coding, and evaluations.

Zheng says establishing a relationship with Morningstar, which has a global reach, can open exciting new opportunities for Illinois Tech students to work on research projects or earn internships in a rapidly growing industry.

“The grant collaboration is expected to establish a long-term relationship with Morningstar, which results in not only future research collaborations, but also strengthens our data analytics and data science programs,” he says.

Illinois Tech students have conducted their own fintech research as well. Illinois Tech’s inaugural Grainger Innovation Prize in 2021 attracted a team of student researchers who developed a sustainable digital currency. Team GiGi (Green lightnInG coIn), advised by Ioan Raicu, associate professor of computer science, took the competition’s top prize with a goal of innovating a digital currency that is not only more energy efficient, but also competes in speed with other centralized payment processing approaches such as credit cards.

Gabriel Bryk (CS, 4th Year) says Team GiGi addresses these flaws in cryptocurrency by using larger blocks with smaller block times to increase transaction speed. Improvements in energy efficiency is achieved by using an improved proof-of-space algorithm to secure the digital currency, he says.

Illinois Tech is home to assets that complement the technical and mathematical skills needed to excel in fintech innovation, research, and education. These

resources include Stuart School of Business and the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, which provide the resources to develop entrepreneurial soft skills, including how to manage technology, build tech teams, develop a tech roadmap, pitch to investors, and cultivate effective communication skills.

It is natural that Illinois Tech has utilized these resources to develop a degree program that will teach new fintech leaders. The university launched its Master of Financial Technology this fall, which explores the tools and techniques that are pushing today’s data-driven economy.

“The finance industry is simply moving too quickly— there is a global shortage of fintech talent,” says Dixon, who will serve as the fintech program’s director. “It’s difficult for companies to find strong technology students who understand finance. Additionally, there have been several recent billion dollar crypto and data science companies collapse due to financial illiteracy, including Terra’s UST and Zillow Markets.”

Dixon says he plans to differentiate Illinois Tech’s program by leaning on the mathematics behind finance, but also adding the tech elements of computer science and cybersecurity.

“Make no mistake: at its core, this is a hands-on program with a lot of coding and focus on basic financial data analysis,” Dixon says.

“We do place an emphasis on math and statistics, as they not only help to understand how to build robust finance models and data-driven fintech products, but also verify that they are correct. All the top fintech employers need strong critical reasoning and problem-solving skills combined with mastery of financial technology.” ●

Photo: Nancy Wong Photography

Maurice Dawson’s Fulbright Research Examines Emerging Threats in Africa

aurice Dawson, assistant professor of information technology and management at Illinois Institute of Technology, used his award from the United States Fulbright Scholar Program to explore cybersecurity issues in developing countries and how they can have a global impact.

Dawson, who also serves as director of Illinois Tech’s Center for Cyber Security and Forensics Education, allocated his fourth Fulbright Scholar award to conduct research and deliver lectures at Botswana International University of Science and Technology.

Dawson says that his time in Botswana was an excellent opportunity to discover cybersecurity solutions in countries that are becoming more dependent on technology. He discovered that cultural issues complicated technical cybersecurity issues.

“The people of Botswana are very trusting,” Dawson says. “It’s a country of 2.4 million people, and everybody seems to know everybody.”

Botswana is also surrounded by neighboring countries with corrupt governments, political instability, and scammers who operate freely, Dawson says, and it is closely connected to its neighbors. For example, Botswana works closely with South Africa for some of its infrastructure needs and Zimbabwe to supplement its labor force.

This combination of a trusting culture and close ties with its neighbors can make for a challenging cybersecurity environment.

“When you’re sharing resources with your neighbors, it opens new vulnerabilities,” Dawson says. “You expect your neighbor to be secure, but that’s not always the case.”

There are elements in place to improve cybersecurity in Botswana, Dawson says. The tech infrastructure has been modernized, which allows the implementation of cybersecurity measures.

“Having that central infrastructure is a big deal, so we can have the cybersecurity mechanisms in place,” Dawson says. “Now

they have to start thinking about attacks. Throughout most of the country, they just don’t think about it.”

Part of Dawson’s work included examining cybersecurity issues associated with the drones that the Botswana Defence Force uses to deter poaching. Botswana is home to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the Moremi Game Reserve, and a network of national parks that cover nearly a fifth or more of the country’s land mass. This vast wilderness attracts poachers from neighboring countries.

“The Botswana Defence Force relies on outdated methods to look for poachers from Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa,” Dawson explains. “We looked at how drones could include other internetenabled technologies and ensure that cybersecurity can be used to secure the data these drones are collecting.”

Dawson teamed up with Oteng Tabona

and Thabiso Maupong of Botswana International University of Science and Technology to edit a cybersecurity book, Cybersecurity Capabilities in Developing Nations and Its Impact on Global Society. The book, Dawson’s fourth on the subject of cybersecurity, is a collection of research and case studies that examine the security of mobile devices, databases, system networks, and the Internet of Things as developing nations make rapid advances in technological progress.

“We knew we had time to work on editing the book, so we contacted researchers from South Africa to make contributions,” Dawson says. “All these nations are thinking about the Internet of Things, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. They need to think about security as well.”

The book covers the techniques, laws, and training initiatives being implemented and adapted for secure computing, and is designed as a reference source for researchers, university academics, computing professionals, and upper-level students.

The book also explores how cybersecurity issues in these developing nations can have a global effect.

“It looks at how a credit scam in South Africa can affect me in Singapore,” Dawson says. “Everything is intertwined.”

Dawson wrote a chapter of the book, “East African Cybersecurity: Improving Microfinance Database in Ethiopia.” His collaborators on the chapter include Damon Walker, an assistant teaching professor of information systems and technology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and Tenace Setor, assistant professor of information systems and quantitative analysis at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He also recruited two recent Illinois Tech alumni, Andreas Vassilakos (ITM, M.A.S. CYF ’21) and Harshini Chellasmy (ITM, M.A.S. CYF ’22), to make contributions.

The research highlights how Kenya has become an East African leader in using information communications technology (ICT), specifically in mobile payments and health care. Other East African nations, such as Ethiopia, have seen how this technology has impacted Kenyan society and are increasingly trying to replicate those efforts.

In Ethiopia, many farmers rely on ICT to secure financing to cover the costs of land leases, materials purchases, and labor. Dawson says the highly authoritarian government has made security issues more difficult as they have outlawed security measures such as Voice over

Internet Protocol. However, the significant undermining of the use of cryptography leaves micro-financing databases vulnerable.

“Many times, farmers apply for a loan, and that information gets lost,” Dawson says. “In many cases, the information is stored on USB drives, and someone drives them to another location to process the loan. It’s not uncommon for those USB drives to get lost.”

Dawson says the research team looked at open-source solutions that could be effectively installed into these databases and USB drives to make them more secure. Dawson says the costs of securing these assets are a big concern, which is why the team focuses efforts on open source solutions.

To further provide insight into the connectedness of cybersecurity, Dawson held the Positive Uses of Technology and Science Scientific Workshop in Tunisia in July 2022. The conference had participants from L'Institut Supérieur des Etudes Technologiques en Communications de Tunis, Nigeria, Saint Louis University, Capital Technology University, Botswana International University of Science and Technology, and others. He aims to hold this conference back in West Africa and Nigeria in summer 2023.

Dawson says he hopes his experience at Botswana International University of Science and Technology can lead to further research collaboration and the possibility of student exchanges. He says he is encouraged that some researchers he met during his time at Botswana participated in ChiCyberCon, a cybersecurity conference held on Illinois Tech’s campus in April 2022. ●

When you’re sharing resources with your neighbors, it opens new vulnerabilities. You expect your neighbor to be secure, but that’s not always the case.”

—Maurice Dawson

nderrepresented tech students—especially women, underrepresented minorities, and first-generation students—face unique challenges finding professional experience before graduation, but an Illinois Institute of Technology alumnus has launched a new initiative to help these students obtain internship opportunities.

Vinesh Kannan (CS ’19) established Scarlet Data Studio to offer paid software engineering internships for Illinois Tech students who are struggling to overcome the challenges that hinder them from participating in real-world experiences.

“I regularly witness hard-working, curious, and talented Illinois Tech students get passed over for internships. These rejections lead some students to doubt their skills or even feel isolated,” Kannan says. “We hope the experience and confidence they gain from Scarlet Data Studio will help them succeed in their career goals.”

All students face their own career preparation challenges, and the interns participating in Scarlet Data Studio are no exception. The interns noted that their specific challenges include caring for a family member at home, needing work authorization, working full-time or part-time while taking courses, and having other internships canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some reported discrimination because of their race, gender, ethnicity, or identity.

“We realized that we didn’t need a company to offer students an internship,” Kannan says. “Instead of just helping students search for existing internships, we created new internships so more Illinois Tech students could have more opportunities to learn and grow.”

This past summer, Kannan recruited five fellow Illinois Tech alumni who are working as professional software engineers to serve as mentors for Scarlet Data Studio. Ten Illinois Tech students were selected for a four-week internship to analyze public data and develop features in Python, SQL, and JavaScript.

Together, they created TransitHealth, a website that shows how public health and transit data in Chicago has shifted since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the city. Using data sets found in the City of Chicago’s Data Portal, each intern took ownership of a data set and launched features to tell a story about how their topic affected each neighborhood and intersected with public health issues.

“Our goal for each intern was to get them to contribute to all three parts of our codebase: offline pipelines, back-end server, and front-end application,” Kannan says. “From there they then move on to a stretch project, where they work on a task just above their current skill level.”

Scarlet Data Studio was the first internship experience for Jacqueline Macias (M.A.S. CYBS 2nd Year). She had the distinct team role of performing a cybersecurity audit on the website and implementing fixes.

“I was able to perform fixes by inserting security headers into the back end of the code and upload the new code,” she says. “This experience elevated my curiosity in the field and what I might look forward to in the future.”

Scarlet Data Studio was a perfect opportunity for Maria Garcia (CS ’21) to work on front-end components of the website, as well as extracting data, transforming it to a usable format, and loading it to the site.

“I am the first in my family to go to college, working while studying, and I don’t have a car, so I rely on public transport. As a young woman, that can be limiting since I try not to be on the train after dark,” she says. “All these factors made it difficult for me to get an internship or even know where to start looking for one, so Scarlet Data Studio was a great opportunity for me.”

She says the experience will not only enhance her resume but also gave her the confidence to enter the industry.

“I often have imposter syndrome, feeling as though I am not good enough to work in tech,” Garcia says. “SDS showed me otherwise.”

William Javier (CS ’21) also says the experience he gained through Scarlet Data Studio built up his confidence. He proved to himself that he can be motivated to learn and meet the demands of a given project.

“I owe a lot to my mentors,” he says. “When I felt ashamed that I couldn’t solve a problem, they told me not to be ashamed, but strive to be better, to take it easy, and never be afraid to ask questions.”

Fabian Abrego (CS ’21) says he learned new programming languages and new flavors of familiar languages during his work with Scarlet Data Studio.

“Overcoming these challenges came down to my determination to create a great product and being able to work alongside my mentor,” Abrego says. “Being able to see my programming come to life on the website was the most enjoyable for me. It really felt like I was contributing to a website already being crafted by many talented people.”

Mentors play a key role at Scarlet Data Studio. Kannan says he deliberately recruited Illinois Tech alumni to serve as mentors to give interns role models who represent their next step in professional growth. The mentors also are people the interns can rely on for realistic career advice in the future.

Aleksandra Kukielko (CS, M.S. CS ’18) is an applications developer at Liventus, a Northbrook, Illinois-based e-commerce company. She had previous mentoring experience as a member of Illinois Tech’s STARS chapter, and was excited to serve as mentor with Scarlet Data Studio after Kannan reached out to her. She says she was impressed with the interns’ skills and abilities to grasp the concepts outlined in the project.

“I was really expecting to have to hold someone’s hand through the entire project,” she says. “But these students were smart, knew what to do, and asked good questions.”

Kukielko had a similar college experience to many of the Scarlet Data Studio interns, saying she struggled through coursework. However, her confidence grew, too, when she had some handson experience working on real-world projects, and she knew this experience would be valuable to the interns.

“Scarlet Data Studio gives great exposure to what a programming career is outside of school—working with other developers; maintaining your own goals; using the network of mentors to guide yourself on the right path; seeing the deliverable in the form of a real, online website,” she says. “These are all invaluable skills that not all students can get.”

Kannan says he is working with Illinois Tech’s Career Services to expand Scarlet Data Studio to grant paid internships to 20 Illinois Tech students and match them with 12 mentors next summer. He says he hopes the numbers grow each year.

“We hope that every Illinois Tech student who wants to go into software engineering can do at least one paid internship before they graduate,” he says. “We can reach that vision by helping more students find existing internships and by creating new internships.”

●

I regularly witness hard-working, curious, and talented Illinois Tech students get passed over for internships. These rejections lead some students to doubt their skills or even feel isolated. We hope the experience and confidence they gain from Scarlet Data Studio will help them succeed in their career goals.”

—Vinesh Kannan

Michael Paul Galvin Tower

10 West 35th Street, 14th Floor Chicago, IL 60616 www.iit.edu/computing

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