Review: 3/14 ISSA Ft. Worth Chapter Meeting

I attended the Ft. Worth Chapter ISSA meeting yesterday for the first time in a while. My new position has made it difficult to get away and they have undergone some changes that I was excited to go see. At this point, there is a lot of aspiration. I am excited to see what the perspiration is able to produce. Nevertheless, the first meeting's presenter did a great job. Ms. Sharon Reynolds, CISO of Omnitracs, LLC, gave a presentation over the security, or lack thereof, of the computers within our automobiles. While she is in the area related to trucking and freight, the issue is much larger in scope. Essentially, this issue stems from poor designs developed decades ago before IT computer security was on the tip of everybody's tongue like it is today. Controller Area Networks (CANs) are used in automobiles today and essentially let anyone send messages of any kind across the network. This is like in the "old days" of shared ethernet...but worse. When your computer crashes, you reboot. When your car crashes...  Because it is a shared bus with not authentication, once you access the system, you can start sending commands to virtually anything connected to the CAN. Unfortunately, in today's automobiles, that can be an awful lot. Consider that braking, steering, ignition, fuel, etc all tend to be computer controlled in new automobiles. Toss in Bluetooth functionality and all of a sudden, attack vectors go wireless too. This can get scary really quickly. See the video below. In their case, Chrysler had to issue a recall which can get extremely expensive.

Now, Jeep Grand Cherokees were not her only example. Toyota, Fords, and even other "unnamed" vehicles were cited. One of the more recent examples was Tesla. However, in the case of Tesla, something interesting happened. Tesla issued a patch within 10 days of the exploit that automatically updated their cars remotely, thus representing a significantly more efficient process of addressing the issue than having to perform a recall. Additionally, they upped the security of their cars by requiring updates to be digitally signed by Tesla for the car to download a patch. Pretty nifty Mr. Musk;). At least passenger car do have one thing going for them. Their CAN design is unique to each manufacturer, model, and year. So, they have security through obscurity. For those of a security mind. That is of little comfort but at least it is something. Large vehicles, including semis, school buses, etc are standardized meaning as these hacks get easier, it would be easier for organized crime to shut down a fleet of vehicles, holding them for ransom until a company paid. Nation states could paralyze critical infrastructure by making it unsafe for trucks to safely deliver needed goods and services.

Now, it was not all doom and gloom. There are a number of acronyms working on this problem from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). They are looking to develop standards as well as policy to make it more difficult to hack vehicle and impose stiff penalties for those who do. In the mean time, they next time you are driving down the road and your car does something weird, maybe it's a glitch. Then again, maybe it's your friendly neighborhood hacker;)

Review: Southwest Decision Science Institute Conference 2017

This is a small regional conference that I like to attend regularly because it is laid back, friendly, and most of the research presented is exploratory and thus, usually quite interesting. I usually get some of my very best research ideas from this conference (as opposed to some of the big name conferences in my discipline). So, with that in mind, here's my review of this year's conference in Little Rock, a new location for the conference.

The first session I attended was part of the Innovative Education track. Since there were multiple sections over this track and my paper later in the day was in this track, I wanted to see what was going on. The paper was titled "IT Careers Camp: Broad Lessons Learned from Eight Year of 'Doing IT'" by Bartczak, Downey, McGaughey, and England, all from the University of Central Arkansas. Doing something like this is a little out of my comfort zone but essentially, the idea was putting on a summer camp open to high school students from around the state. Cost to students was free due to the sponsorship by an area fortune 500 company. There were multiple goals given the different constituents involved. For the sponsor, it was to address shortages in technical staff. For the university, it help to develop a pipeline of students as well as job placement for their students. The camp is something they were doing for 3.5 days and they felt that having students stay overnight in dorms was important. Again, there was no cost to students. Important things to include are parent involvement the first day to help answer questions about what IT is (increase awareness of IT), make it fun, promote the university, and actively recruit females. They emphasized the need to partner with area employers, collaborate with other departments, identifying best/appropriate advertising channels, dorm stay, factoring in "slack time" for students, and the encouragement of "return campers" who are candidates for more advanced activities and can become leaders in subsequent camps. Regarding execution, build excitement before the camps starts through FB, crowd source t-shirt design, etc. Include hands on activities such as robotics and 3-D printing. Include some variety in the schedule and encourage students to bring their own devices. Seek help from area businesses and "keep 'em fed'. The results indicated that the camps did increase female student awareness of IT major and related careers and approximately 10% of campers ended up attending the university.

The second presentation I attended was, well, my session, the second Innovative Education session. The first presentation was "An Analysis of Student Perceptions of the Quality and Course Satisfaction of Online Courses" by Cynthia Barnes and Michael of Lamar University and the University of Houston-Clear Lake respectively. I was surprised a little as they go into their presentation because the focus was a little different than what I had anticipated. They examined student perceptions of the quality of online versus face to face classes by asking students of their perceptions. They found that students like online classes due to their flexibility, responsiveness to emails, technical support, ability to control use of multi-media, instructor's delivery strategies, etc. Factors that lead to student satisfaction include timely feedback, social presence, support services, quality learning outcomes, and collaboration and interaction. Unfortunately, most students feel that they learn more from face to face classes than they do online. Teaching mostly online courses, I found this disheartening but, they were not done just yet. While there were no difference of opinion between the genders, older students stated that they tend to learn more from online classes whereas younger students learn more in face to face classes. Additionally, those with little experience taking online courses state they learning more from face to face classes while those with more online class experience state they learn as much or more in online courses. All students, regardless of major, seem to feel face to face classes are better learning environments.

The next presentation were "Tips for Effective Student Engagement in the Classroom" by Khaled Alshare of Qatar University. He discussed the importance of student engagement, regardless of whether or not it is academic or non-academic. He described student engagement as "energy in action". It is important to develop student engagement "patterns", particularly for students at risk so they do not fall through the cracks. Demonstrate each classes' relevance by taking the time to go over the objectives for the day in detail and relate them to the students. Plan class activities around the objectives and provide students time to reflect on what they learn. Finally, it does not all have to be academic. He included an extra credit assignment where students submitted jokes relevant to the class to him which, if approved, he shared in a "joke" discussion thread with the rest of the class. Reminds me of the funny videos that I share with my students.

The presentation right before mine was "Technology, Education, and Development: The Driving Factors" by Kamssu, Siekpe, Alyami, and Nkonge, all of Tennessee State University. The impact technology has on education is largely seen as positive but there are negative effects as well. For example, there has been a decline in student handwriting ability given that many/most students use a keyboard of some type to complete their homework. Nevertheless, Brewer et al, 2005 found that technology, when combined with sound educational principles, can enhance student learning. Students find technology interesting, it can increase skills, and replace irrelevant/dated text books. It can also improve students' communication skills, collaboration skills, as well as their ability to concentrate and it can improve their global awareness. Because students are becoming more comfortable with technology, they are helping to future proof their prospects as they become more adaptable to potential technologies of the future.

The next presentation was the best of the conference, mine, over "'Chunking' Semester Projects: Does it Enhance Student Learning?". It was well received but I will dedicate a separate blog post to that so I can go into more detail.

The next session I attended was the Marketing track where the session chair was Dr. Thiagarajan Ramakrishnan of Prairie View A&M. "Ram" an I were doctoral students back at the University of North Texas and it was great to catch up with him. I sat in for the first presentation by Dr. Wu, one of my colleagues at Tarleton State University who gave a presentation over "Neuromarketing Stimuli, Methods and results: A State-of-the-Art Review". Between being a colleague and out of my area of expertise, I am going to pass on summarizing her presentation.

I sat in on a few other sessions and presentations but did not get a lot out of them until I sat in on the Social Media & Social Networking track. Specifically, a presentation by Dr. Hill of the University of Central Arkansas over the "Temporal Effects in Social Media Based Big Data Streams" was interesting. Important aspects of big data include the volume of the data, its velocity, and variety (Laney, 2001). Social media typifies this definition. To be able to identify patterns, temporal precedence is important as well (Cook and Campbell, 1979). This makes something like Twitter a treasure trove of data. In order to examine this, Dr. Hill looked at social media based election predictions. Models built "after the fact" for the German election of 2010 and the U.S. election of 2008 suggest that such prediction might be possible and there is real interest in this. A Google Scholar search for "Social Media Election Prediction" yields over 130,000 hits. Now, the caveat to this is that these have been models based on "past" elections. Detractors of this approach include Gayo and Avello, 2012 as well as Lazer, Kennedy, King, and Vespignani, 2012 whi argue that so far, such models represent post-hoc analyses and are not predictive tools. Dr. Hill gathered data for the 2014 and 2016 U.S. elections to examine differences. He gathered data from candidates for the house and the senate from candidate Twitter accounts. Not surprisingly, he found significant differences and "habits" that seem to be related to the success/failure of a candidate's election to office. However, he also found that the time element has an effect on the volume, velocity, and variety of big data and that as a result, the development of a true predictive model is unlikely. He plans to continue his data gathering over future election cycles in order to further his research.

Unfortunately, I was late to the next presentation, "Automating the Literature Review Process for Academic Research Studies by Dr. Stephens and Dr. Young both of Bradley University. I thought it might be quite interesting and the part that I was able to see truly was. Essentially, by using a web scraping tool (Web Scraper.io) and Google Scholar, you can gather articles for review almost instantly. While this certainly would do little good for articles that you need to read and digest, for research in which you are wanting to do some sort of text analysis on, it could be hugely beneficial. Even in the case of the former, it at least provides you with a way to methodically and consistently gather data through Google Scholar. For example, you can pull different fields, such as the abstract for textual analysis. For articles that have PDFs attached/linked, you can "grab" those as well if you want to go into more depth. This was very cool. I wish I had been able to see the entire presentation.

The final regular presentation I saw was titled "Behavioral Intentions of Performance on Student Evaluation of Course Quality: An Application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour" by Miller, Furman, and Jackson of Henderson State University (HSU), Augusta State University, and HSU respectively. The biggest take away for me from this presentation was to survey students at the half-way mark to make sure that the class is on track to meet the objectives stated at the beginning of the semester. As someone who has started paying closer attenuation to course level objectives, someone who has in the past taken unofficial mid-semester surveys to gauge my own performance, and someone who has, just this semester, formalized my mid-semester survey based on our own university's extension/application of Chickering and Gamson's (1987) work, I found this particularly interesting. It made me consider the need to update my mid-semester surveys to include some sort of statement to determine the student's opinion about our progress as it relates to meeting the stated course objectives.

After that presentation, I stepped out and ended up joining the doctoral consortium that Mr. and Mrs. Dr. Prybutok led. For the most part, I was not officially invited and rather, joined them along with Ram who was there to discuss some of his experiences as a former doctoral student and now professor. I have always taken to role of mentoring very seriously and appreciated those who have taken the time to mentor me. Unfortunately, but the time the focus shifted to junior faculty (I guess technically I am now senior faculty, just less senior than Mr. Dr. Prybutok), I had to leave. But, this is something I would be interested in participating in, in the future.

All in all, this is a nice conference to attend. It is part of the Federation of Business Disciplines which brings together several other small, regional conferences under one umbrella. As a result, you get some of the advantages of a larger conference yet at the same time, a small, cordial environment to discuss research, bounce ideas off of one another, and just generally catch up with old friends. While I was not able to make any of the security related tracks where my research interests are due to scheduling conflicts, overall, attending the conference was still a success. If you are interested in this conference, next year, it is being held in Albuquerque New Mexico next year, March 7-10, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency. So, join up, get involved, and attend!