Fall 2014 iConnect

Interactive social media app heightens Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts Experience

Fall 2014 | College of Information Sciences and Technology

Penn State’s Center for Human-Center Interaction building an innovative community, one interaction at a time

Jack Carroll, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology (IST), is leading efforts at the Center for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to enable and empower communities through information and communications technologies.

iConnect, the magazine of the College of Information Sciences and Technology is published twice a year by the Office of Communications and Outreach.

Editor & Writer: Stephanie KoonsArt Director: Kelly BryanPhotography: Emilee Spokus

Alumni Relations: 814-863-7548E-mail: [email protected]

All inquiries and comments should be sent to: [email protected]

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The Pennsylvania State University is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to programs, facilities, admission, and employment without regard to personal characteristics not related to ability, performance, or qualifications as determined by University policy or by state or federal authorities. It is the policy of the University to maintain an academic and work environment free of discrimination, including harassment. The Pennsylvania State University prohibits discrimination and harassment against any person because of age, ancestry, color, disability or handicap, national origin, race, religious creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or veteran status. Discrimination or harassment against faculty, staff, or students will not be tolerated at The Pennsylvania State University. Direct all inquiries regarding the nondiscrimination policy to the Affirmative Action Director, The Pennsylvania State University, 328 Boucke Building, University Park, PA 16802-5901; Tel 814-865-4700/V, 814-863-1150/TTY. U.Ed. IST 15-03

Fall 2014

CONTENTS

IN THIS ISSUE

12 Yellow fever epidemic presents 200-year-old lesson in crisis management 22 A good night’s rest leads to start-up success: IST alum Daehee Park aims to revolutionize the mattress industry

DEPARTMENTS

3 From the Dean

10 Research News

26 Faculty Publications

IST connects students and takes learning beyond the classroom through engaged scholarship

Rather than seeking typical undergraduate experiences, IST students Jules Dupont, Justin Roth and Cassie Juzefyk are broadening their educational horizons by gaining “real-world” experiences that add context to their studies and benefit the University as a whole.

Ready for Cyber Combat: SRA students gain the tools needed to fight online terrorism and security attack

Students enrolled in the Security and Risk Analysis (SRA) program at the College of IST are provided the tools, both inside and outside the classroom, to combat increasing privacy and security threats in the digital age.

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TransitionsFinal thoughts from Dr. David Hall, dean 2009 - 2014

The past year at the College of Information

Sciences and Technology (IST) has

been a very successful one marked by

many transitions. Due to the efforts of

our faculty and staff, we have completed

our part of the Penn State For the

Future: The Campaign for Penn State

Students raising over $32 million in gifts

for scholarships and in-kind software and

materials (achieving over 200 percent

of our goal); completed the first year of

a two-year strategic planning effort and

delivered our draft College Strategic

Plan for incorporation in the University

Strategic planning process; held another

very successful Start-up Week involving

over 40 speakers from start-up companies

and well-established international

corporations to discuss innovation and

entrepreneurship; grown our online

education programs to include over 700

undergraduate students and 300 graduate

students; and continued to achieve

success in our placement of students for

internships and jobs. Our faculty members

have achieved recognition in their research

and teaching. We are joining with the

Institute for Cyber Science and the Huck

Institute of the Life Sciences to propose

a new Center for Big Data Analytics and

Discovery Informatics led by Dr. Vasant

Honavar, and are participating in a new

General Electric Center for Collaborative

Research in Intelligent Natural Gas

Systems (CCRNGS) center (with the

Smeal College of Business, the College of

Engineering, and the College of Earth and

Mineral Sciences. These are all exciting

accomplishments and new opportunities

for the College.

Effective August 1, I transitioned from

my role as the Dean of IST to return to

the faculty ranks. I would like to take this

opportunity to congratulate Dr. Mary Beth

Rosson on her new role as the Interim

Dean for the College of IST. I know she

is excited to assist the College in our

transitional period. The College of IST is

well respected at the highest levels of the

University, and we are on a great trajectory

for new opportunities in research, new

educational programs, and continued

growth. Exciting times are ahead.

3Fall 2014 College of Information Sciences and Technology

RESEARCH NEWS

4 College of Information Sciences and Technology Fall 2014

Penn State’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction Building an innovative community, one interaction at a time

Throughout human history, “community” has been a foundational

yet evolving concept. Modern communities are not only defined

by spatial boundaries, as in traditional neighborhoods, but also

by shared interests, common affiliations, and mutual need. The

continuing expansion of the Internet and mobile technology has

introduced opportunities for people to not only form new networks,

but also foster growth and development in their communities.

Jack Carroll, distinguished professor at Penn State’s College of

Information Sciences and Technology (IST), along with his fellow

researchers, is developing new technologies with the intention of

promoting an innovative, vibrant, socially engaged community in

the State College, Pa. area.

“Community is still about developing identity, engagement, and

mutual support through association with other people,” said

Carroll, a researcher in the field of human-computer interaction

(HCI) for over 40 years. “But community can also be a place

where innovation is cultivated.”

Carroll, who has a doctorate in experimental psychology from

Columbia University, is director of Penn State's Center for Human-

Computer Interaction (HCI), and has courtesy appointments as

professor of computer science and engineering, psychology, and

learning, design and technology (in the College of Education). His

research interests include methods and theory in HCI, particularly

as applied to Internet tools for collaborative learning and problem

solving, and the design of interactive information systems.

The Center for HCI is an interdisciplinary organizational unit

for human-computer interaction research, instruction, and

outreach within Penn State and beyond. The center, according

to its website, “uses existing partnerships with community

organizations, foundations, and commercial organizations to help

facilitate change in society with respect to the potential utilization

of information technology.”

For the past 20 years, Carroll has focused his research on

community informatics, an emerging field of investigation and

practice that is concerned with information and communication

technology (ICT) in relation to communities and their social,

cultural, economic and service development, among other

dimensions. Carroll, along with other researchers, post-doctoral

scholars and graduate students at the Center for HCI, has

directed several projects that

are intended to promote

dialogue among community

members, bring people who

share common interests

together, and set a path

for State College, Pa.

to become a pioneer in

community informatics.

For the past several years,

Center for HCI researchers

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have introduced a novel element into one of State College’s

most revered traditions—the Central Pennsylvania Festival of

the Arts. The festival, which was founded in 1967 by the State

College Chamber of Commerce and Penn State’s College of Arts

and Architecture, brings over 100,000 people to downtown State

College and the University Park campus of Penn State each July

to celebrate the arts.

In 2008, as part of an effort to make the arts festival more

interactive, Carroll and his associates developed the Central

Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts web app. Using the app, which is

now available for both iPhone and Android smartphones, festival

goers can access the festival’s official website (which includes

descriptions of all 300 artists who sell their works at the festival),

schedules of various music, dance and theatrical performances

and other festival activities. The app can display the locations

of artist booths and performance venues, and app users can

determine the artists and performances that are in close proximity

to their current location. Users can also create personal itineraries,

share photos and post comments about Festival events.

“The idea is to intensify the experience of the Arts Festival,” Carroll

said.

In addition to accessing the

app, people who visited the

Center for HCI’s booth at the

2014 Central Pennsylvania

Festival of the Arts had

the opportunity to meet

like-minded festival goers.

Visitors to the booth received

an identifying tag, worn as

a lanyard around the neck,

which indicated their personal

interests at the festival, i.e.

food, musical acts and art exhibits. Those who participated in the

activity were able to connect with people who indicated that they

have similar interests, with many of them sharing “selfies” through

the app.

“We want to get people to socialize and communicate with each

other at Arts Fest,” said Patrick Shih, a research associate at the

College of IST and a member of the Center for HCI.

The app, Carroll said, along with the icebreaker activity, were

popular. There were about 1,400 users of the app, along with

150 game participants. In addition, about 100 people completed

surveys about their experiences with the app.

An additional benefit of the Arts Festival app, Shih said, is that

users are able to access photos from past festivals, and thus view

images of a given location throughout the festival’s history.

“It’s all about promoting a sense of community through this digital

curation effort,” Shih said.

In addition to preserving history, one of the Center for HCI’s goals

is to facilitate engagement in shaping the future of the community.

The State College Borough is in the process of implementing the

Downtown Master Plan, which provides a framework to guide

growth and change in the community. The themes, according

to the Borough’s website, “range from recommendations for


marketing and special activities to streetscape and traffic

improvements to future development models and partnerships.”

The Center for HCI developed the Future State College app,

which allows people to review and comment on parts of the

Downtown Master Plan’s proposed improvements to the

community while they are standing at the downtown locations of

those improvements.

“While the process of preparing the downtown plan engaged

many community stakeholders, the app provides another

opportunity for reaching a broad audience to share the vision,”

said Meagan Tuttle, who works in the Borough Planning

Department.

“While community workshops and sketches during public

meetings are a great way to provide a visual representation of an

idea, having an app that allows the community to experience the

ideas in the environment in which they’re proposed can help them

come to life in a more tangible way,” Tuttle said.

Jess Kropczynski, a instructor and researcher at IST Center

for HCI, said that the Future State College app divides the

Downtown Master Plan into four sectors with 30 locations. The

app has a “walking tour” feature that allows users to explore the

plan independently. Users of the location-based app can view

the proposed changes at a particular spot, leave comments and

agree or disagree with a design or concept.

The Future State College app, Kropczynski said, is the only app

of its kind that currently exists. The app is in a trial phase, but the

researchers hope to make the app available to the community in

fall 2014. The app can eventually be adapted to different types of

plans by other organizations, she added.

The main benefit of the Future State College app, Carroll and

Kropczynski said, is that it provides an outlet to voice opinions to

citizens who cannot or do not attend municipal meetings.

“The more you speak up, the more your taxpayer money goes to

something you care about,” Kropczynski said.

In a similar way that people may be shifting away from formal

government meetings, social media sites such as Twitter have

become increasingly popular alternatives to traditional news

outlets for expressing opinions on current events. In 2013, HCI

researchers released Local News Chatter (LNC), a smartphone

app that integrates local news articles and socially generated

tweets from local residents. Their goal in developing the app is

to increase community awareness and engagement by enabling

users to access more dynamic community news information.

“We found that using Local News Chatter causes people to

experience their community as stronger, and identify with it more,”

Carroll said.

The LNC app extracts a set of distinctive terms from articles

published in news outlets in the State College area—Centre Daily

Times, Daily Collegian, www.statecollege.com and Penn State

News—and utilizes them to find associated tweets from local


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Twitter accounts. The app displays those terms in a tag cloud and

presents related formal news articles and tweets in an integrated

display. The researchers are interested in understanding how

users experience aggregated community information while using

the app, and in how the app helps people be more aware of local

community news and activities.

One variant of the app, which currently has about 40 to 50 active

users, now contains a sentiment analysis tool that displays a

“community affect meter” that indicates whether a topic is viewed

positively or negatively. The researchers are interested in how

codifying affect about community events can be appropriated as

a resource for sense making and participation. Another variant of

the app extracts crisis event terms, such as “fire,” to make such

events more visible to the community.

While technology may be a driving force in social change, factors

such as economic conditions and human psychology can also

spur technological advancements. Time banking, which refers

to community-based volunteering in which participants provide

and receive services valued by the amount of time they require

to perform, is an example of the symbiotic relationship between

culture and technology. Carroll and his associates are working

on a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)

that is intended to strengthen communities through a mobile time

banking system.

Time banking is “quite radical and innovative,” Carroll said,

because time is a much more personal and widely available

resource than money.


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“Everyone has the same amount of time,” he said. “It’s an

equitable way for citizens to exchange value.”

In 2012, Carroll received an award of $497,553 from the NSF

to support his project, “Socio-technical Issues in Mobile Time

Banking.” The project, in partnership with Victoria Bellotti of

the Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif., incorporates

mobile computing and Web 2.0 services to carry out a design

research investigation of mobile time banking.

Time banks originated in the 1980s with anti-poverty activist Edgar

Cahn, as described in his book, No More Throw Away People. Cahn

developed “time dollars” as a new currency to provide a solution to

cuts in government spending on social welfare. A typical time bank

hosts a basic website, usually implemented on one of a few special

purpose time banking or alternative currency exchange software

platforms. Websites typically display lists of service offers and

requests from time bank members (e.g. electrical work, plumbing,

babysitting). For an hour of service such as dog-walking or house-

painting, one time dollar is debited from the recipient and awarded

to the provider. The provider then uses the dollar to pay for service

from another, and the recipient can provide a service to anyone

else to earn back the debit.

“People like the idea (of a time bank), but it’s something that

communities have to get used to,” Shih said.

While time banking may not yet be mainstream, it is catching on

quickly. According to Wikipedia, 26 countries currently have active

time banks. In addition, there are 250 time banks active in the

United Kingdom and over 276 time banks in the U.S. The time

banking model took off around 2008, Shih said, in the middle of a

global economic recession.

“People are looking for alternative ways of doing things at a lower

price,” Shih said. “It’s a paradigm shift in our workforce.”

Carroll and Shih cited Uber (a venture-funded startup and

transportation network company based in San Francisco that

makes mobile apps that connect passengers with drivers of

vehicles for hire and ridesharing services) and Airbnb (a website

that connects people with extra space with people seeking

lodging), as examples of successful companies that capitalize on

the notion of a peer-to-peer sharing economy.

Carroll and his associates are in the process of refining the time

banking model and making it more efficient. As part of an effort to

make time banking a more immediate and less time-consuming

experience, the center has implemented IOS and Android apps for

its time banking system. In addition, the center recently received

a $1.2 million award from the NSF for a joint project with Carnegie

Mellon University and the Palo Alto Research Center that has

a goal of creating a software model of time bank user interests

and experimenting with a “push” framework in which interaction

opportunities would be suggested to the user based on his or her

preferences and current location.

As a community informatics researcher, Carroll said, he is fortunate

to live in a progressive community like State College that is open

to experimenting with new technologies. Eventually, he hopes that

the ideas that are generated at the Center for HCI will spread to a

wide variety of communities across the U.S. and the world.

“Community will always be about human development, but that

includes innovation,” Carroll said. “There is a huge amount of

community innovation today; it’s exciting to be part of it.”


People in leadership positions may sacrifice privacy for securityPeople with higher job status may be more willing to compromise privacy for security reasons and also be more determined to carry out those decisions, according to researchers.

This preoccupation with security may shape policy and decision-making in areas ranging from terrorism to investing, and perhaps cloud other options, said Jens Grossklags, assistant professor of information sciences and technology.

In two separate experiments, the researchers examined how people with high-status job assignments evaluated security and privacy and how impulsive or patient they were in making decisions. The researchers found that participants who were randomly placed in charge of a project tended to become more concerned with security issues. In a follow-up experiment, people appointed as

supervisors also showed a more patient, long-term approach to decision-making, added Grossklags, who worked with Nigel J. Barradale, assistant professor of finance, at the Copenhagen Business School.

The findings may explain why people who are in leadership roles tend to be more decisive about guarding security, often at the expense of privacy, according to the researchers. In the real world, high-status decision-makers would include politicians and leaders of companies and groups.

"Social status shapes how privacy and security issues are settled in the real world," said Grossklags. "Hopefully, by calling attention to these tendencies, decision makers can rebalance their priorities on security and privacy."

IST lab receives software designed to mirror how humans think and actCognitive modeling—an area of computer science that deals with simulating human problem solving and mental task processes in a computerized model—has been applied in a variety of areas such as military simulations, computer game and user interface design, and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Such models, which often act as agents (self-contained computational systems) in synthetic environments, can be used to simulate or predict human behavior or performance on tasks similar to the ones modeled. The Applied Cognitive Science Lab at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) recently was gifted copies of a commercial agent development software product that is designed to create more realistic models that reflect how emotion and physical factors affect human decision making and behavior.

“If an opponent in a simulated environment always does the right thing and always does it immediately, it can be hard to learn how to respond to that opponent’s real-life counterpart,” said Frank Ritter, a professor at the College of IST and co-director of the Applied Cognitive Science Lab. “It’s useful in simulation to have a model that more accurately reflects how people really behave.”

Agent Oriented Software (AOS) has given the Applied Cognitive Science Lab 20 copies of the commercial JACK (Java Agent Construction Kit V5.6) and CoJACK (Cognitive JACK) agent development software. AOS supplies products for building, running and integrating commercial-grade multi-agent systems, built on a logical foundation: Beliefs, Desires, Intentions (BDI).

Health-related mobile technologies can help consumers make smarter choicesErika Poole recalls that her dad had his first heart attack in his 30s when he was walking on the beach. The second one happened when she was 9 or 10 years old. "I basically grew up watching him go into the hospital every single year," she says. "I remember visiting him in the cardiac ward. I particularly remember all the fruit baskets," she notes with a wry chuckle. The young girl who watched her father's health crises is now a Penn State researcher who wants to do something to help others like him. "He was basically a two-pack a day smoker, and every bad thing he could possibly do, he did. It's heartbreaking to see that, and to see how preventable it all could be by making slightly smarter choices."

Poole, an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, has dedicated her career to helping people make those smarter choices. Her recent work includes a large study of adolescents and "exergaming," the use of video games that promote physical participation. Another study looked at the use of text messaging in smoking cessation programs. Currently, Poole is helping to develop guidelines for human-centered design of health technologies that make use of smart phones and other mobile devices. The latter is a cross-disciplinary project pulling together technology experts with health professionals, aimed at encouraging designs for health-related apps that people will want to use.

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RESEARCH NEWS


Doctoral student receives grant to develop technology for diagnosing

Elizabeth Eikey, a doctoral candidate at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), is interested in how technology can be used to improve health outcomes. Eikey’s research goal, which is now being supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is to advance diagnostic technology that will help struggling children learn to read.

Dyslexia is “a developmental reading disorder that is characterized by difficulty with learning to read fluently and with accurate comprehension despite normal or above-average intelligence,” according to Wikipedia, and “has profound effects that span across a lifetime,” Eikey wrote in her graduate research proposal.

“By bringing dyslexia diagnostics into mainstream education, I can improve accessibility, reduce costs of diagnostics, create a better learning environment for every student (including those without dyslexia) and increase literacy in the U.S., which will foster a better society overall,” said Eikey, who graduated from Penn State with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in fall 2010 and entered the doctoral program at the College of IST in fall 2012.

As a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Eikey will now have an opportunity to explore learning disabilities technology in depth. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), according to the NSF website, “recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited U.S. institutions.”

dyslexia

IST professors help to develop tools to access ‘scholarly ’ big dataAcademic researchers and corporate managers often seek experts or collaborators in a particular field to enhance their knowledge or maximize the talents of their workforce. Harnessing that data, however, can be a challenge. Researchers at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) have devised recommendation systems for expert and collaborator discovery that enable users to access “scholarly big data.”

“Everyone talks about big data,” said Hung-Hsuan Chen, one of the researchers on the project. “But in academia, not many groups have this volume of data from CiteSeer. For data-driven research, we have a very good opportunity for big data research because we are one of the few groups that have such a large volume of data.”

Chen, who received a doctorate degree from the Department of CSE in December 2013, was one of the two graduate students from Penn State among the 25 selected from over 250 applicants worldwide to present his research, "CSSeer: an

expert recommendation system based on CiteSeerX," at Amazon's first annual Ph.D. Symposium on "Building Scalable Systems" on Nov. 20, 2013 at Amazon headquarters in Seattle. He was supervised by C. Lee Giles, David Reese Professor of IST and Graduate Professor of CSE. In addition to Chen and Giles, the paper was co-written by Pucktada Treeratpituk, computer scientist at the Ministry of Science and Technology in the Thai government; and Prasenjit Mitra, associate professor at the College of IST.

In the paper, the researchers propose CSSeer, a free and publicly available keyphrase-based recommendation system for expert discovery based on the CiteSeerX digital library and Wikipedia as an auxiliary resource. CSSeer generates keyphrases from the title and the abstract of each document in CiteSeerX. Those keyphrases are then used to infer the authors’ expertise.

“The system automatically figures out who are the experts of a given area,” Chen said.

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Among natural and man-made disasters, there is perhaps nothing

more baffling and terrifying than an infectious disease outbreak. In

1793, a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia killed about 5,000

people and altered the course of history. According to Ed Glantz,

a senior lecturer at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences

and Technology (IST), an outbreak could wreak similar havoc in

modern times, and emergency response systems may not be much

better prepared than they were over 200 years ago.

“I actually believe a lot of those terrible outcomes could happen

today,” said Glantz, who teaches in the Security and Risk Analysis

(SRA) program at the College of IST.

A paper that Glantz wrote on the topic, “Community Crisis

Management Lessons from Philadelphia’s 1793 Epidemic,” won

the Best Insight Paper Award at the 11th International Conference

on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management

(ISCRAM), which was held recently at the College of IST. The

theme for ISCRAM2014 was empowering citizens and communities

through information systems for crisis response and management.

The conference focused on the local community, the individual and

the technologies that can be employed to improve crisis response

at the local level.

According to Glantz’s paper, public health organizations, including

the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World

Health Organization and the U.S. Department of Health and

Human Services, are “greatly concerned that a new influenza

type A outbreak will result in a rapid spread of infectious disease,

overwhelming existing medical response infrastructures.” Each of

those organizations has published planning guides that call upon

local and community organizers to begin preparing for such an

event. To establish insight and provide context for the organizers,

Glantz’s paper presents a case analysis of the Philadelphia yellow

fever outbreak of 1793.

In 1793, Glantz wrote, Philadelphia was at its peak, serving as

the capital of both Pennsylvania and the recently formed U.S.

government. With 50,000 residents, it was the largest metropolitan

area in the U.S., and its port handled one-fourth of the nation’s

shipping. The city’s good fortune ended in July 1793, when a

cargo ship brought the female Aedes aegypti mosquito, along with

individuals currently infected with yellow fever. Confusion and panic

quickly set in, as there was no medical direction on what would halt

the escalating death rates, and most city, state and federal officials

and employees had already fled their posts. About 40 percent of

residents, including most of the city’s wealthy, evacuated — even

George Washington retired to Mount Vernon earlier than expected.

The city’s government ceased to operate, resulting in crime,

abandonment and people being left out in the streets to die.

The death rate did not begin to decline until November, Glantz

wrote, when the temperature dropped and the frosts began. While

the crisis may have subsided, the epidemic—along with the way

it was handled—had severely damaged Philadelphia’s standing in

public opinion.

Yellow fever epidemic presents 200-year-old lesson in crisis management

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“The crisis served as a basis for attack in subsequent recriminations

and politicking,” he wrote. “In addition, Philadelphia had lost its

most favored city allure, along with any hope of remaining as

capital of the United States.”

An epidemic occurs when new cases of a certain disease, in a given

human population, and during a given period, substantially exceed

what is expected based on recent experience. A pandemic, on the

other hand, is an outbreak of global proportions. It happens when

a novel virus emerges among humans and causes serious illness,

spreading easily from person-to-person. According to Glantz, there

are many useful insights to assist modern crisis management from

an analysis of Philadelphia’s 1793 epidemic.

“We know we’re going to have two or three major pandemics each

century,” Glantz said.

The College of IST is taking a proactive approach in training future

leaders in emergency management, he said, by teaching skills that

have wide applicability. The SRA major at the College of IST looks

at how to design systems that are secure, how to measure risk

and how to ensure that proper levels of privacy are maintained

for individual technology users, businesses, government and other

organizations. The concepts that are taught in the SRA classes,

Glantz said, can also be applied to epidemiology. In his paper,

he wrote that epidemics “merit further consideration for crisis

management, similar to the response and decision making of other

natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes.”

“The paper talks about non-traditional crises, such as infectious

diseases, that include all of the horror of a natural disaster with

some exacerbating differences,” Glantz said.

The circumstances that typically surround an epidemic/pandemic,

he said, include fear, confusion, decimation of caregivers and lack

of support from neighboring communities. The SRA curriculum

can be tailored to counteract infectious disease outbreaks in a

number of ways, Glantz said. Through intelligence analysis, people

could identify up-and-coming diseases as well as determine the

appropriate community response and treatment. SRA students who

are studying risk management learn to identify risks and develop

controls to limit those risks, which could be useful when dealing with

contagious outbreaks. The CDC has a rigorous two-year training

program for public health officials, Glantz said. In the introductory

SRA class that he teaches, he introduces an intelligence analysis

model that is based on a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak. The skills

he teaches in the class, he said, are based on the CDC training

model.

The Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic, Glantz said, along with

other infectious disease outbreaks throughout history, reveal the

need for better community planning to handle the spike in people

seeking medical treatment during an outbreak, and the need for

individuals who are willing to attend to the needs of the elderly,

the poor and children. There is also an urgent need for families to

have information that would direct them on what steps to take in

the event of a pandemic. In addition, he wrote in the paper, there

is a need to “balance communications between informing and

enflaming the public.”

“You can greatly minimize the outcome (of a pandemic) if you

apply intelligent thought to it,” Glantz said.

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While a college education is highly valued in society, it is often defined in practical and economic terms. Students typically choose a major, earn a degree, and then either enter the workforce or continue their education. In recent years, however, universities have placed an increasing emphasis on undergraduate students acquiring “real-world” experiences to add context to their studies and make them feel more connected to their academic environments.

At the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), several students—Jules Dupont, Justin Roth and Cassie Juzefyk—have been involved in projects that are aligned with Penn State’s goal to enhance undergraduate education through its Engaged Scholarship initiative. Those projects include taking an active role in high-level faculty research, resulting in an opportunity to travel abroad, and helping fellow IST students succeed in their studies by coordinating a peer tutoring program.

In the past several years, Penn State has been actively encouraging undergraduate students to think beyond the classroom through its Engaged Scholarship initiative. Examples of engaged scholarship experiences include undergraduate research, study abroad, community-based learning, service learning, and internships.

Rather than seeing an undergraduate degree as a means to an end, Dupont, a sophomore at IST, seeks to gain the maximum benefit from his Penn State education by immersing himself in high-level research. The highlight of his freshman year was traveling to Seoul, South Korea, to present research on social network deviance at a prestigious international conference.

“I wanted to take full advantage of everything at Penn State,” he said. “It’s a huge research university; I wanted to be part of that kind of effort.”

Dupont, who is from Paoli, Pa., has been working with Anna Squicciarini, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, on a research project that focuses on abusive behavior in social networks. The pair was accepted to present their project at the 23rd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2014), held April 7-11, 2014 in Seoul, Korea. The World Wide Web Conference is an annual international conference on the topics of the future direction of the World Wide Web.

“To our great delight, our demo was accepted,” Dupont said. “In early April, Dr. Squicciarini and I travelled to Seoul, where I presented the demo to other conference attendees.”

“For the students, [undergraduate research] opens up a new perspective on what doing academic work means,” Squicciarini said.

Research has been at the top of Dupont’s agenda since enrolling at the College of IST. At the beginning of his freshman year, he said, he asked his adviser, Lisa Lenze, director of undergraduate academic affairs for the college, about the possibility of doing undergraduate research. She put Dupont in touch with Squicciarini, who was working on a project that focused on abusive behavior in social networks, and Dupont signed on.

“Malicious, abusive or otherwise inappropriate behavior is a huge problem in a variety of online forums,” he said. “The New York Times, for example, maintains a comment section around its online articles. However, due to problems with comment content, the newspaper must pay a human moderator to proofread each and every comment prior to online display. Human moderation is both costly and slow, neither of which are big selling points.”

IST connects students and takes learning beyond the classroom through engaged scholarship

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When Dupont joined the project, he said, there was already a structure in place that he could build on. Ruyan Chen, who was then an undergraduate student who spent the summer of 2013 at the College of IST working with Squicciarini, devised a three-part algorithm for identifying abusive behavior online. After implementing her algorithm, Dupont created a set of animated visualizations that traced the growth of problematic behavior throughout an online community.

“The idea of our project is to identify the comments (in an online forum) that are likely to be abusive or likely to be safe to replace the human moderator so comments can be posted in real time,” Dupont said.

“Jules started writing code, and then he actually exceeded my expectations,” Squicciarini said.

The visualizations that Dupont constructed, she said, illustrate the interactions between users of an online forum and deviant activity such as propaganda and incendiary comments. Through her research, she found that controversial topics such as politics and religion are most likely to trigger abusive behavior.

“That’s where sometimes a network can quickly decay,” Squicciarini said.

While creating the animated visualizations of online network deviance may have been challenging for Dupont, presenting his work at the WWW2014 conference turned out to be a hugely beneficial learning experience. He said he was surprised at the amount of discussion sparked by the project, although on the whole it was well received.

“The feedback you get at a conference is much more intense than what you would receive in the classroom or in other settings,” he said.

However, he added, constructive criticism from other researchers “definitely helps with weeding out bad ideas.”

The trip to Seoul for the WWW2014 conference was an “exceptional opportunity” in several ways, Dupont said. He was able to attend presentations on a variety of topics and met “several prominent individuals, including a few Penn State alumni who now work at Microsoft Labs.”

“On a personal level, the trip was also fantastic,” he said. “I had never been to Asia, so staying in Seoul gave me the opportunity to see a vastly different culture.”

While research is a challenging and rewarding aspect of the college experience, classroom learning is the foundation of undergraduate education. Many students, however, require additional guidance beyond what is taught in the classroom to comprehend the material. Justin Roth and Cassie Juzefyk, seniors at the College of IST, have responded to that need by coordinating a tutoring program at the College of IST that not only enables them to help their peers with their studies, but has also opened doors for themselves.

“I really like to help people,” said Juzefyk, who is from Reading, Pa. “It’s satisfying

when you can help somebody understand something, and it just feels good.”

Roth and Juzefyk are the co-coordinators of the IST Peer Tutoring Program, a centralized academic support resource for students in the College of IST. The tutoring

initiative is a student-managed program funded by the college, which provides one-on-one coaching to help students practice and reinforce concepts in IST and security and risk analysis (SRA) courses.

“We offer another avenue for students to find support,” said Roth, who is from Washington, D.C. “The core support service that we offer is student-to-student tutoring.”

The IST Peer Tutoring Program was founded about a year-and-a-half ago by Lenze and Mary Beth Rosson, interim dean for the College of IST, in response to a growing need among students for additional support beyond the classroom. In the past, requests for tutoring were taken care of by the IST Honors Society (Gamma Tau Phi) Volunteer Tutoring Program.

“As our programming course offerings have grown and more students are requesting assistance, the Honors Society couldn’t keep up with the demand,” Lenze said. “They had done a great job for a number of years, but it was time for the college to step in and support students’ learning.”

The IST Peer Tutoring Program, Lenze said, “exists to help students do the work of learning.”

The program’s objective is to create a supportive environment where trained, experienced student “coaches” can prompt learners to work through problems step by step, debunk common misunderstandings and explain concepts that learners don’t understand.

“We help [students] and we guide them to the answer,” Juzefyk said. “That way, when

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they move on with other aspects of the class, they will remember what they did and will eventually be able to teach themselves.”

While the IST Peer Tutoring Program was initially managed by a graduate student, Lenze said, she felt that it would be beneficial to everyone involved if undergraduates took over the role. About a year ago, she recruited Roth to coordinate the program, who in turn asked Juzefyk to assist him.

“They have completely organized this new program—doing everything from defining goals, writing guidelines, triaging with faculty, and organizing tutors,” Lenze said.

One of the first problems that Roth and Juzefyk had to solve, she said, was figuring out how to staff tutoring hours. The college pays four tutors, but the program has a “much greater need for tutors than four people can meet.” The solution that Roth and Juzefyk devised was for the College of IST’s teaching assistants (TAs) and learning assistants (LAs) to hold office hours during the common tutoring session hours, enabling a “full room of support for a variety of courses.” Learning assistants are undergraduate students who serve as learning coaches and mentors for students, while supporting instructors with teaching-related tasks. In addition, Roth and Juzefyk both actively tutor during tutoring hours.

“All of our tutors are really awesome and passionate about this,” Roth said.

In addition to helping their fellow students succeed in their courses, Roth and Juzefyk said, coordinating the IST Peer Tutoring Program has assisted in their own personal and professional development. Juzefyk, who interned over the summer at Becton Dickinson, a medical technology company in East Rutherford, N.J., said that her tutoring experience corresponds to assisting clients as an information technology (IT) professional.

“Students who attend the tutoring sessions are coached towards the solution of the problem to force them to call upon previous knowledge to solve the problem,” she said. “I use this aspect of tutoring at my internship because I am only working there for three months, so when I leave my team needs to know how to continue the work that I have completed over the summer. Therefore, a knowledge transfer needs to take place, and to do this I hold meetings with my team to coach them through the processes so they can learn how to perform the task and make it more efficient based off of their working styles.”

Roth, who participated in a summer internship at Lockheed Martin, a global aerospace, defense, security and advanced technology company headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, said that his role in the tutoring program has given him the opportunity to provide input on the IST curriculum and “interface with my fellow students in a way I wouldn’t otherwise.” In addition, he developed a personal interest in instructional theory.

“Now that I know what it means to help others take responsibility for their learning, I am able to recognize and appreciate the behaviors of leaders at my company who strive to create a culture of learning among their teams,” Roth said. “This summer, my manager designed meaningful and challenging assignments for me that required me to think and learn on my own, and I want to continue helping my peers feel the same sense of accomplishment I felt when I proved to myself that I could learn and apply new skills.”

Roth’s and Juzefyk’s involvement with the IST Peer Tutoring Program, Lenze said, fits the University’s definition of engaged scholarship on several different levels. In addition to developing leadership skills, Roth and Juzefyk, along with the other tutors, are “complementing their own in-classroom learning of the subject matter in IST and SRA courses.”

“Regardless of which hat they are wearing for the tutoring program, they are engaging themselves and the other tutors (and the LAs) in scholarship that benefits their peers in the College of IST,” Lenze said.


For the Future: The Campaign for Penn State Students Closing Celebration

Mt. Nittany InnApril 11, 2014

1. Scholarship recipient Joshua Buitrago SRA ’14 2. Music performed by “Chuck and Matt” 3. IST Advisory Board Member Antonio Pensa and wife Carol 4. IST Advisory Board Member Robert Bardusch 5. IST Advisory Board Member Donald Haile and wife Mary 6. Scholarship recipient Cierra Freeman IST ’12 7. IST Advisory Board Member Jordan Rednor and wife Elizabeth 8. Weebly founders Dan Veltri ‘07, David Rusenko IST ’07, Chris Fanini IST ’12 9. Scholarship recipient Corey Lee SRA ‘12 10. Gary and Anna Cesnik 11. Nick and Melinda Berardi with daughters Besty and Abby 12. IST Advisory Board Member Bob Morgan and wife Tammy and son Andrew

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SRA students gain the tools needed to fight online terrorism and security attacks

READY FOR CYBER COMBAT

In today’s rapidly changing digital world, individuals and organizations face an increasing number of privacy and security threats. Students who enroll in the Security and Risk Analysis (SRA) program at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) are provided the tools to combat those risks.

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Rather than relying solely on lessons learned in the classroom,

SRA students are exposed to “real-world” experiences that

enhance their knowledge of complex issues such as terrorism and

cybersecurity. In the past year, SRA students have been able to

acquire firsthand knowledge in those areas through activities such

as a cybersecurity competition sponsored by an influential think

tank, numerous extracurricular activities that enable SRA students

to apply the concepts they learn in the classroom to competitive

scenarios, and a special presentation by a former high-ranking

government official, the highest-level government speaker to

present at IST thus far.

“One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that our SRA

students need to know more than just the technology and the

law,” said Gerry Santoro, a senior lecturer in the SRA program.

“They need to know policy.”

Several SRA students who are members of the SRA Club and the

Information Assurance (IA) Club had an opportunity to flex those

skills when they visited the Atlantic Council, a major bipartisan

think tank in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 8-9, 2014, to participate in

the Cyber 9/12 Student Challenge. The Atlantic Council promotes

constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs

based on the Atlantic Community's central role in meeting global

challenges.

The 2014 competition marked the third year of the Cyber 9/12

Student Challenge, said Santoro, who coached the SRA team,

and the first time that the College of IST was invited to participate.

The Cyber 9/12 Student Challenge is designed to offer

students, across a wide range of academic disciplines, a better

understanding of the policy challenges associated with cyber

conflict. Part interactive learning experience and part competitive

scenario exercise, the event gives students interested in cyber

conflict policy an opportunity to interact with expert mentors,

judges, and cyber professionals while developing skills in policy

analysis and presentation. Student teams are challenged to

respond to an evolving scenario involving a major cyber-attack

and to analyze the threat it poses to state, military, and private-

sector interests. Teams are judged based on the quality of their

policy responses, their decision-making processes, and their oral

presentation to a panel of judges.

The SRA Club gives students a place to expand their knowledge

and expertise in the field of security and risk analysis. While

housed in the College of IST, the SRA Club reaches out to

students University-wide.

The IA Club is designed to supplement and extend the information

security concepts discussed in the IST and SRA majors. Through

talks, demonstrations, interactive seminars, competitions, and

guest speakers, the club seeks to keep members informed of

cutting-edge concepts and explore the challenges of the future.

The club also invites corporations to speak about current issues

facing the industry, as well as provide networking opportunities

and information sessions for club members.

The students who participated in the Cyber 9/12 Student

Challenge included John Kissell (the current SRA Club president),

Trevor Fisk (formerly the SRA Club president, who graduated with

an SRA degree in May 2014), Brady Ripka, and Jarred Rittle. The

team had an advantage, Santoro said, since all of the members

had taken classes in cybersecurity, technology, and cyber law.

“Our team was the most technical of any of the teams,” he said.

The scenario that the SRA team tackled, Santoro said,

involved a major denial-of-service (DOS) attack launched against

major U.S. institutions, “essentially halting all trading.” A week

later, it is discovered that targeted malware designed to wipe

out all the systems it infects caused the attack, and North Korea

claims responsibility. One of the judges’ criticisms of the SRA

team, Santoro said, was that the team was “too conservative” in

its response to North Korea’s “confession.” However, the team

was vindicated when new information revealed that the attacks

actually came from China, not North Korea, and that the malware

was stolen from a U.S. Department of Defense lab.

Kissell, a senior SRA major, said that his participation in the

Cyber 9/12 Student Challenge enabled him to develop a better

understanding of the policy challenges associated with cyber

conflict.

“Coming from the College of IST, we are primarily focused on

the technical aspects of cyber conflict, security, and incident

response,” he said. “While we have a course in policy (IST 456),


Gerald Santoro Senior Lecturer and Security and Risk Analysis Club Advisor

the policy approach in [the Cyber 9/12 Student Challenge] is

more in the sense of major political steps to take after a major

event has happened.”

“This allowed myself to see that the two worlds can be very

different, the people with technical knowledge operate in one

sphere and the policy experts operate in another, and if one is

able to bring knowledge that creates an overlap there becomes

great potential for creating information and responses that

incorporate the best of both processes,” Kissell concluded.

In addition to the Cyber 9/12 Student Challenge, members of

the IA Club have had other opportunities to practice the lessons

they’ve learned in classes in a more dynamic environment.

Each year, the club travels to Washington, D.C. to participate

in ShmooCon, an annual East Coast hacker convention which,

according to its website, is “hell-bent on offering three days of an

interesting atmosphere for demonstrating technology exploitation,

inventive software and hardware solutions, and open discussions

of critical information security issues.”

“This is also a great opportunity for students to network with some

of the biggest names in the information security industry,” said

Chase Miller, former president of the IA Club who graduated from

the College of IST in May with an SRA degree.

Miller, who is currently pursuing a Master of Science in

Information Technology degree at Carnegie Mellon University,

said that the IA Club also participates in a variety of cyber

“capture the flag” competitions. Hosted by schools including New

York University Polytechnic School of Engineering; University of

California, Santa Barbara; and Carnegie Mellon; the events are

a “great opportunity for students to apply the tactics, techniques,

and procedures learned in the classroom and club meetings, to

real-world cyber security challenges.”

According to Santoro, cyber-warfare and cyber-espionage

are relatively new areas for which the “rules of engagement”

have not yet been written. There is tension between industry

and government over regulation of home computers that are

becoming increasingly infected by bots – software applications

that run automated tasks over the Internet, sometimes for

malicious purposes. In addition, DOS attacks flood the entry

points to a company’s network so that legitimate users can’t

access the system.

Dealing with such formidable adversaries requires cybersecurity

professionals who are up-to-date on the latest threats,

technologies, and policies. To help meet that demand, Santoro

is currently working with Pete Forster, associate dean for online

and professional education and information technology at IST,

in developing a course that deals with “cyber-crime and cyber-

warfare methods and policies.”

“The human component is really what drives the SRA curriculum,”

Santoro said. “The cybersecurity profession requires a mixture of

people smarts and technological expertise.”

One of the challenges of the SRA program is

responding to evolving technologies that have transformed the

way warfare is conducted. In recent years, terrorist groups have

been using the Internet to spread propaganda, share information,

coordinate attacks, and recruit new members. Don Shemanski,


Jarred Rittle (standing left), John Kissell (right) Brady Ripka (seated left), Trevor Fisk (right).

a professor of practice at the College of IST, addresses those

issues in his class, “SRA 211: Threat of Terrorism and Crime.”

On Feb. 26, 2014, Shemanski and his students had the benefit

of hearing firsthand the insights of Admiral Dennis Blair, a

distinguished military veteran and intelligence expert. Blair, who

served as Director of National Intelligence from January 2009

to May 2010, delivered a presentation, “Conducting Intelligence

Operations in a Cyber Connected Democracy,” to Shemanski’s

class. Blair, who currently serves as a member of the Energy

Security Leadership Council of Securing America’s Future Energy

(SAFE), talked about the history and structure of the intelligence

community, the evolution of the National Security Agency

(NSA), electronic Internet surveillance, the role of intelligence in

homeland security and counter-terrorism, and the need to share

information across agencies.

“Our students are always interested in hearing real-world

experiences,” Shemanski said.

As Director of National Intelligence, Blair was the President’s

principal advisor on intelligence issues and led the federal

government’s 16 intelligence agencies. He retired from the U.S.

Navy in 2002 after 34 years of service, and has been awarded

four Defense Distinguished Service medals and three National

Intelligence Distinguished Service medals.

“This is the highest-level speaker that we have managed to bring

into one of our classes,” said Shemanski, who joined the faculty

of the College of IST in 2008, after serving for 23 years as a

diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service.

Fisk, who attended the presentation, said Blair focused on a few

ideas during his talk, “one of the main ones being how information

has transformed warfare.”

With all this new data, comes a new battle space and new

tactics,” Fisk said. “Blair spoke about how even with all this

technology, no single machine can solve a problem by itself, and

we need to integrate past methods with future technology to solve

complex problems.”

Ryan Kohler, currently a sophomore SRA major, who also

attended Blair’s presentation, said that he enjoyed getting

a firsthand account of the intelligence analysis profession,

especially since his current internship involves intelligence

gathering, manipulation, and application.

“During the presentation, Admiral Blair talked a bit about the

recent debates over governmental ‘spying,’” Kohler said. “I

particularly found that interesting, because based on the way

our media system is set up, we get a very biased view against

anything the government does, and to hear the other side and

hear the justifications was a very nice change of pace.”

Kissell, who was also in attendance for Blair’s talk, said that his

“take-home message” would be that the cybersecurity field is

constantly evolving and professionals who enter the field must be

able to adapt to the shifting landscape.

“Additionally, there will always be a need for people who

understand technology and the technical aspect of intelligence,

as every day we progress further into our reliance and use

of technology,” Kissell said. “SRA prepares us for effectively

understanding how this technology works, how to use it to our

advantage and to another's disadvantage.”


A good night’s rest leads to start-up success: IST alum Daehee Park aims to revolutionize the mattress industry

For some aspiring entrepreneurs, the idea of building a business without outside funding may seem like too much of a risk. However for Daehee Park, a 2009 graduate of the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), and his business partner, John-Thomas Marino, founding the online mattress company Tuft & Needle with only $6,000 of their personal savings was a risk well worth taking.

Driven by a vision of providing customers with a quality mattress

at a reasonable price, the pair have succeeded through a

combination of ingenuity, ambition, and perhaps most importantly,

a customer-focused mentality.

“We figured we can fix the experience but also the pricing for

mattresses,” said Park, who has a bachelor of science degree in

security and risk analysis.

Park and his friend, Marino, who studied computer science and

math at Penn State from 2006 to 2009, founded Tuft & Needle

out of the personal frustration Marino experienced when trying

to purchase a quality mattress. On the company’s website,

Marino said that when he got married, he and his wife purchased

a $3,300 memory foam mattress that “didn’t meet our comfort

expectations” and described the experience as “worse than

shopping for a car.”

“At the time, I was working together with Daehee—my good friend

from college—at a company (Mulu) in Palo Alto,” Marino wrote on

the website. “Shortly after this long ordeal of finding a mattress, I

shared a few of my frustrations with Daehee to discover that this

had happened to him, too. We realized that there needed to be a

fix.”

“Mass-market mattresses from big brands are overpriced not

only because of greed but also because they are inefficient,”

Park said. “The product passes through many hands to get to the

customer—the manufacturer, their salesperson, the distributor,

the retail store, the salesperson on commission, then the delivery

men.”

“When we launched, we were able to keep our overhead low by

launching with an online storefront and keeping our team pretty

lean,” Park said. “The key to our low prices while creating a

quality product was cutting out the middlemen in the distribution

chain and putting our customers first before our profits. We were

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confident that by leading with a great customer experience, the

money would follow.”

Tuft & Needle’s mattresses range in price from $200 to $600,

and are available in five-inch and 10-inch models made out of

foam. According to the website, the company sources all the raw

materials—everything from the threads to the zippers. Since the

company uses high-quality materials, the website states, the

mattresses should last for seven to 10 years.

As Tuft & Needle mattresses are not sold in brick-and-mortar

stores, one of the company’s biggest challenges is convincing

potential customers to purchase a mattress without seeing it or

trying it out first. To help allay any concerns, Tuft & Needle offers

a customer-friendly return policy in which buyers have 30 days to

return a mattress, and the company will pick up the returns at no

cost.

“Contrast this to the typical model of mattress manufacturers

selling wholesale to retailers, which are reminiscent of car

dealerships,” Park said. “We were able to become the top-rated

mattress on Amazon.com because we constantly tweaked our

product and experience until people really loved it.”

According to published reports, Tuft & Needle had $1 million in

sales in 2013 and followed that with $500,000 in the first two

months of 2014. Their mattresses, which are sold directly to

consumers from their website and on Amazon, have soared to

the top ranks on Amazon.com. Tuft & Needle’s products are

not only the highest-rated mattresses sold on Amazon, but also

the highest-rated products in the online retailer’s giant furniture

category overall.

In addition to shaking up the mattress industry, Tuft & Needle has

a philanthropic mission. The company’s objective is to provide

high-quality, easily transportable beds to foster children across the

country without beds to call their own. Fundraising and delivery

began with a pilot program in the Phoenix area in January 2013,

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and the company has since expanded its charity efforts to the

national level.

“The focus on our local region was a good start to testing

the model when we first launched, and as we’ve grown as

a national brand we saw the opportunity to reach many

more people,” Park said. “We now donate new or gently

used mattresses to people in need around the U.S. by

collaborating with non-profits like Salvation Army and Habitat

for Humanity.”

Park’s entrepreneurial spirit has been evident since his days

at the College of IST, where he was involved in research,

served as a teaching assistant for a number of courses, and

led a team of students to a winning slot in the worldwide

Google Online Marketing Challenge. Prior to co-founding Tuft

& Needle, Park led the monetization and analytics initiatives

at Mulu, a celebrity-supported social platform that raises

money for charities; and was a marketing strategy consultant

at Acxiom, a global interactive marketing company.

While Tuft & Needle has made remarkable gains in the past

couple of years, Park says that neither he nor the company

as a whole has any intention of falling into complacency.

“We’re working really hard on growing a mattress company

that people love,” he said.

In a few years, Park said, he would like to dedicate more

time to mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs and helping others

“craft and achieve their visions.” As a company that started

out with little capital and hasn’t done any advertising (relying

instead on referrals), Tuft & Needle has overcome numerous

obstacles to get to where it is today. If there is one message

that Park would like to convey to people who are following a

similar path, it is the importance of persistence.

Park and Marino had the opportunity to talk at length about

tenacity and share their insights on building successful

companies in a presentation entitled “Bootstrapping a

successful start-up without venture capital,” which they gave

during IST Start-up Week 2014, held at the College of IST

April 7-11. Since its inception in 2012, Start-up Week, a

week-long showcase of innovation and entrepreneurship,

has drawn dozens of speakers from around the country,

including many IST alumni, who have created well-respected

and valued businesses and products in today’s technology

market.

“I wanted to contribute back to the students here,” Park

said. “IST has a great reputation for building student

entrepreneurs. There’s still a lot of work ahead of us,

including additional products that complement the mattress.”


Start-up WeekApril 7-11, 2014

1. Tikhon Bernstam, Scribd, Parse 2. mHealth Challenge Participants 3. Steve Huffman, Reddit, Hipmunk 4. Daehee Park IST ‘09 Tuft & Needle 5. Pamela Sorensen ‘94, Pamela’s Punch 6. Start-up Week Reception at Pegula Ice

Arena

7. Ryan Glynn, SRA ’12, mhoto, CinemaRama

8. IST Advisory Board Member Rod Murchison ‘91, Tripwire

9. David Rusenko IST ‘07, Weebly 10. Paul Cianciolo ’07, FirstMark Capital 11. Jayme Goldberg ’92, SilverLine

Athletics

12. Matt Miller ‘01, CyberCoders, CareerBliss 13. Start-up Week (Cybertorium) 14. Start-up Week panel 15. Dan Mead ‘75g, Verizon Wireless 16. IST IdeaMaker Challenge winners

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Murder, intrigue, an historical backdrop and romance—all of those elements can be found in “His Lordship’s Legacy,” the debut novel of Don Shemanski, a professor of practice at the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). To write the book, he drew upon his experiences with the United States Foreign Service, where he served for 23 years as a diplomat, as well as his love of detective literature.

“I wanted to try my hand at a novel,” said Shemanski, who joined the faculty of the College of IST in 2008 and teaches in the Security and Risk Analysis (SRA) program. “I was a huge fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was younger.”

Shemanski’s book, “His Lordship’s Legacy,” was published at the end of June 2014 by Amazon and is available in both paperback and Kindle. Shemanski’s literary agents, Folio Literary Management of New York City, arranged the deal with Amazon, which has a special publishing program for books by agented authors. The story, which is set in 1898 in Washington, D.C., on the eve of the Spanish-American War, revolves around the murder of Lord Arthur Llewellyn-Dornay, a wealthy British Ambassador who is found stabbed through the heart after a glitzy soiree. It is up to two detectives -- Washington, D.C. Police Inspector John Decker, and Scotland Yard’s Colonel Robert Pierce MacGregor -- to unravel the mystery and uncover the truth.

As far as having insider knowledge of embassy culture, Shemanski has a wealth of experience to draw from. Immediately prior to joining the College of IST, he served as Counselor for Global Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, directing the office responsible for high-priority policy issues such as counter-terrorism, nuclear nonproliferation, climate change, and international judicial assistance. He has had a number of postings in

Washington and abroad, including tours in Italy, Pakistan, Cyprus, and Germany. His assignments have included serving as coordinator for State Department refugee assistance programs for the former Yugoslavia, delegate to the U.S. Delegation to the Vienna CSCE Follow-up Meeting, Deputy Special Envoy to the Afghan Mujahedin, and Alternate U.S. Delegate to the foundation, “Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future,” which administered payments to former World War II-era forced and slave laborers of the Nazi regime.

Rather than setting his novel in the present day, Shemanski said, he chose an historical setting to avoid problems in possibly having to obtain clearance from the government, and also because he has an interest in the late Victorian era. He made sure that the historical and technical references in the book were correct, he said, such as how fast a car could be driven in 1898, and how long it took to cross the Atlantic Ocean by steamship.

Writing mystery novels isn’t the only way that Shemanski puts his creative skills to use—he also conducts multi-week simulations of a terrorist plot in several of his SRA classes. In both endeavors, he has to hit the “sweet spot” of giving the reader or student the correct amount of information so that they can solve the mystery. The obstacles in writing a novel, he said, include “remembering as you are writing it which characters know what as well as what the reader should know, and keeping all the moving parts organized.”

“It was a goal that I wanted to see if I could accomplish,” he said.

Shemanski, who is currently working on a second novel that deals with espionage, said that writing has been a lifelong passion.

“I love the element of being able to create your own universe,” he said.

Faculty Publications


1. Media, Meaning, & the Legitimation Problem from the Eradication of the Meta Narrative to the Present Paperbackby Gregory O'Toole

The late Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote that metanarratives, that is, the big stories we live by, legitimate our lives both as individuals and collectively, living within societal groups. Lyotard also explained that the metanarrative has been eradicated from Western culture and that efficiency (i.e. a fast-track to profit) is the only model left which leaves the current state of legitimation in a curious position. In order to understand the process leading to legitimation, “Media, Meaning, and the Legitimation Problem” works to establish the necessary workflow toward the metanarrative: the flow of the message from knowledge, to establishing meaning, to legitimation.

2. A Student Guide To Success At Penn State by Edward Glantz

U.S. News and World Report ranks Penn State among the top 15 public universities nationally. Penn State enrolls over 70,000 undergraduates in 20 campuses, including 15,000 first-year students that begin each year. “A Student Guide to Success at Penn State” transitions new students to success in the competitive Penn State classrooms, including note taking and time management skills, as well as student activities and support resources. Students are also provided career entrance strategies, including interview and resume preparation suggestions.

3. Innovative Practices in Teaching Information Sciences and Technology: Experience Reports and Reflections by Jack Carroll (Ed.)

Innovative Practices in Teaching Information Sciences and Technology: Experience Reports and Reflections” describes a set of innovative teaching practices from the faculty of Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. Each chapter is a personal essay describing practices, implemented by one or two faculty, that challenge assumptions, and push beyond standard practice at the individual faculty and classroom level. These are innovations that instructors elsewhere may find directly accessible and adaptable.

4. “Secure Cloud Computing, Advances in Information Security Series”, pages 303-324. Springer, 2014. in Software Cruising: A New Technology for Building Concurrent Software Monitor by Dinghao Wu, Peng Liu, Qiang Zeng, and Donghai Tian. In Sushil Jajodia, Krishna Kant, Pierangela Samarati, Anoop Singhal, Vipin Swarup, and Cliff Wang (Eds.)

Cloud computing continues to experience a rapid proliferation because of its potential advantages with respect to ease of deploying required computing capacity as needed and at a much lower cost than running an owned computing infrastructure. However, the lack of ownership brings in myriad security and privacy challenges that are quite difficult to resolve. The purpose of this book is to provide a state-of-the-art coverage of the techniques to address these issues at all levels of the stack ranging from hardware mechanisms to application level techniques.

5. Foundations for designing user-centered systems: What system designers need to know about peopleby Frank Ritter, Gordon D. Baxter, and Elizabeth F. Churchill

Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems” introduces the fundamental human capabilities and characteristics that influence how people use interactive technologies. Organized into four main areas—anthropometrics, behaviour, cognition and social factors—it covers basic research and considers the practical implications of that research on system design. The authors have deliberately developed “Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems” to appeal to system designers and developers, as well as to students who are taking courses in system design and human-computer interaction (HCI). The book reflects the authors’ backgrounds in computer science, cognitive science, psychology and human factors.

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Fall 2014 iConnect

Documents

Transcript of Fall 2014 iConnect