Summer 2015 – Page 3 – Seidenberg School News

Eiman Ahmed continues Seidenberg’s DS3 legacy at Microsoft

1. Who are you working with this summer? (…and what do they do?)

I am a student at Microsoft Research’s Data Science Summer School. Otherwise known as DS3, this program’s initiative is to introduce and teach college students how to acquire, clean, and utilize real data for research purposes.

2. Can you tell us a little about what you are doing? (We might not understand the technicalities, but we’d love details!)

My team and I (we call ourselves the “Subway Surfers”) are using the MTA’s subway/turnstile data to compute a network flow of New York City to make better predictions and assist social projects like “Stop-and-Frisk” by providing them with information as to how many people (estimated) are at any given place in New York City at any given time.

3. Is there a particular class, peer, or professor at Seidenberg that has helped you prepare specifically for your current internship? (Clearly, we’re all about shout outs this summer!)

Briana Vecchione, a Seidenberg student (and an amazing friend) introduced me to this program! She was a part of DS3 last year (the first year the program took place) and worked on the “Self-Balancing Bikes” project.

4. Does your new office have a favorite restaurant/hangout they go to after work? (No! we’re not going to show up like proud parents!)

Every Tuesday the researchers here get together to discuss a project that they are working on at around noon – (this is known as “Tea Time”). Though the students and I don’t particularly have a favorite restaurant/hangout, we do like to tune into some of the Tea Talk sessions that occur.

Microsoft Presentation — Eiman and her DS3 team after presenting their work on August 6th.

Eiman Ahmed is going into her sophomore year of undergrad, earning her BS in Computer Science.

Brandon Weaver is spending his summer working for Tudor Investment

1. Who are you working with this summer? (…and what do they do?)

I am working with IT Client Services at Tudor Investment. We handle all front-end and a decent amount of back-end technical issues in the firm

2. Can you tell us a little about what you are doing? (We might not understand the technicalities, but we’d love details!)

We image machines for offices, set up conferences, troubleshoot issues with users, provision phones, etc. Essentially we cover everything technical in the firm.

3. Is there a particular class or professor at Seidenberg that has helped you prepare specifically for your current internship? (Clearly, we’re all about shout outs this summer!)

Professor Courtney provided me the opportunity and coding background for this internship. Professor Frank’s Networking class provided a majority of the knowledge that I use on a regular basis.

Brandon Weaver is a student at our Pleasantville campus, and alongside of classes works as a CS/CIS tutor and supervisor for Educational Media.

Seidenberg organizes important HPCC conference for this month

Pace University Seidenberg Computer Science (CS) Department at Westchester is organizing the 17^th IEEE HPCC 2015 (IEEE High Performance Computing and Communications) conference that will be held on Aug. 24- 26, 2015 at the Hilton Newark Airport Hotel, NJ. Faculty member Dr. Meikang Qiu from the CS Department at Westchester is its General Chair, and Pace University’s CS-PhD students and faculty will present a dozen of quality papers at IEEE HPCC 2015 or its co-located conferences.

The IEEE HPCC conference is a prominent conference in the world of computing. The conference focuses on providing a platform for scientists and engineers in academia and industry to address the profound challenges in global High Performance Computing (HPC), and present their new experiences and research done in all aspects of HPC, Big Data, cloud computing, and related topics. There will also be eight co-located conferences, symposiums, summits, and workshops, also run as part of IEEE. The co-located events will include the 12^th ICESS (International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems), the 7^th CSS (International Symposium on Cyberspace Safety and Security), BigDataSecurity 2015 (International Symposium on Big Data Security on Cloud), HPSC 2015 (International High Performance and Smart Computing), SmartData 2015 (International Symposium on Smart Data), and the High Performance Big Data Summit (HBD).

IEEE HPCC 2015 aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners who are working on high performance computing and communications from both academia and industry in the world. The conference usually brings in around 400 Computer Science professors and scholars from across the world. Among the dozen of IEEE/ACM fellows delivering the keynotes are Jack Dongarra (top scholar in High Performance Computing, ACM and IEEE Fellow), Sun-Yuan Kung (IEEE Fellow, Princeton University), Xiaodong Wang (IEEE Fellow, Columbia University), Tarek EI-Ghazawi (IEEE Fellow, GWU), Sandeep Shukla (IEEE Fellow, IIT India), and Ruqian Lu (Academician of Chinese Academy of Science). More than ten industrial entrepreneur leaders will deliver important topics about High-performance Big Data (HBD) on the associated summit, including Jim Jeffers (Intel), Long Fei (Google), Stan Posey (NVIDIA), Kevin Johnson (IBM), Greg Clifford (Cray), and Yung-Chin Fang (Dell).

The conference is organized by IEEE HPCC/ICESS/CSS 2015 committees and sponsored by IEEE, IEEE TCSC, IEEE Computer Society, Pace University, and Longxiang High Tech Group. This conference will be a great opportunity for scholars to connect with academics within a harmonious atmosphere filled with enthusiastic, experienced, and successful members of the computing society. The high-quality research papers presented in the conference cover a broad scope of academic research topics in computer science. The research achievements showcased at these conferences include experimental efforts, innovative system designs, novel technology explorations and evaluations, and investigations identifying the weakness in the existing computing and communication technologies.

Nachiket is spending his summer at Argus to work in financial analytics

1. Who are you working with this summer? (…and what do they do?)

I am working with Argus Information and Advisory Services. They perform a broad range of financial analytics ranging from benchmarking, wallet analysis, syndicated studies as well as regulatory functions with credit card transaction and account-level data.

2. Can you tell us a little about what you are doing? (We might not understand the technicalities, but we’d love details!)

I am presently working on a regulatory project. Our client is a US government institution and we are vested with the task of performing data validation and ensuring a high quality of data is maintained when millions-upon-millions of transaction-level data comes in every month. This requires that I have good Excel and SQL Server skills, and that I am able to scan through thousands of lines of code to edit segments that need to be re-written when something changes with the way data was sent in the current month. We also routinely run ad-hoc projects that involve querying the data or performing certain data-manipulations to derive specific insights or answer questions the client needs.

3. Is there a particular class or professor at Seidenberg that has helped you prepare specifically for your current internship? (Clearly, we’re all about shout outs this summer!)

Since I am working with databases all day long in this position, I think my database specialization is proving useful. Dr. Namchul Shin’s courses have given me a good background that I have an opportunity to seriously enhance this summer and beyond.

4. Does your new office have a favorite restaurant/hangout they go to after work? (No! we’re not going to show up like proud parents!)

I work in White Plains, NY and we have dozens of places to go to for lunch or hang out after work. Downtown White Plains is a pretty vibrant place and it doesn’t look like we will run out of options any time soon!

Nachiket Pingle is completing his MS in Information Systems and is entering the second year of his graduate program.

Briana is spending her summer as a Data Science intern in our country’s capital

1. Who are you working with this summer? (…and what do they do?)

I work as a data science intern under the Office of the Chief Data Officer for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in Washington D.C.

2. Can you tell us a little about what you are doing? (We might not understand the technicalities, but we’d love details!)

I work on a team that handles data management, integration, and dissemination – which essentially means we’re responsible for the Board’s data releases (both internal and external). My project is to analyze the efficiency of our current data release processes as they relate to timeliness and efficiency, design and implement optimization efforts/metrics, and develop a near-real-time operational dashboard for use by management and stakeholders.

3. Is there a particular class or professor at Seidenberg that has helped you prepare specifically for your current internship? (Clearly, we’re all about shout outs this summer!)

At the moment, I’m focusing on algorithm analysis and machine learning models, so I’d like to give a shout out to Professor Benjamin and Professor Cha for all of their wonderful guidance in these fields thus far!

4. Does your new office have a favorite restaurant/hangout they go to after work? (No! we’re not going to show up like proud parents!)

So there’s this place called Buredo near my office that has burrito-sized sushi rolls, need I say more? Those who know me know I’m crazy for sushi, so this place is like a dream come true!

Briana Vecchione is a rising senior in the Seidenberg School, set to earn her BS/CS by May of 2016. She is also a recipient of the Grace Hopper grant that will send her to the Grace Hopper Conference in Houston, Texas this October.

Seidenberg continues cybersecurity education with GenCyber workshop

The Seidenberg School has long been committed to promoting cybersecurity education through a variety of programs and activities. GenCyber, a workshop hosted by Pace and Seidenberg this month, is one of the many ways in which the Seidenberg School has contributed to inspiring the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

The workshop is a prestigious cybersecurity education program funded jointly by the National Science Foundation and the National Security Agency, designed to promote cybersecurity education at the K-12 level. The 2015 Pace GenCyber was designed specifically for high school teachers, and Pace was one of only ten universities nationwide selected to host a teacher workshop in 2015. We welcomed 22 participants, mostly in STEM fields, but not exclusively so, from all over the U.S. including Washington, Florida, Colorado, and Iowa.

The workshop took place at Pace University’s Pleasantville campus, and was spearheaded by Professor and IT WEST Department Chairperson Li-Chiou Chen and Director of Assessment Andreea Cotoranu. The two organized the program from activity design, to instruction, and everything in between. Lectures for the workshop were then delivered by professors of high esteem within the Seidenberg faculty including Li-Chiou Chen, PhD, Charles Tappert, PhD, Meikang Qiu, PhD, and Darren Hayes, DPS with assistance from some of their talented doctoral students. Jigar Jadav, Computer Science teacher at Mamaroneck High-School, and Pace Computer Science PhD student, provided invaluable input on high school instruction and lesson plan development. Moreover, an orchestra of Pace and Seidenberg students and staff ensured that all logistics worked smoothly. According to Andreea Cotoranu, “this was truly a team effort.”

Throughout the two weeks of the workshop, the teachers dove into a variety of integrated lectures, labs, resource sharing, curriculum development activities, pedagogy, and community building that all focused on different aspects of four main pillars in cybersecurity including cryptography, network security, access control/biometrics and computer forensics. The workshop also introduced Design Thinking pedagogical strategies for problem solving, a student-centered approach to teaching that fosters learning through project development (brainstorming, creating, doing, etc.) in lieu of traditional lecture-style teaching methods.

Westchester Magazine quoted participant Virginia Nalbandian, a Pleasantville High School mathematics and computer science teacher, as saying, “the workshop has inspired me as a teacher to return to my classroom and inspire my students. And this is what education should ultimately be about.” Sponsors, participants, and organizers all feel hugely satisfied by the workshop’s success.

Everyone involved in GenCyber left the program with a positive, enthusiastic mindset about going forth and integrating cybersecurity in their curricula. The feedback from both participants and sponsors (NSA/NSF), has been excellent, and we are thrilled with the outcome! The organizers and sponsors are already discussing the plans for the return of the workshop next summer, and we look forward to hear how the project will grow.