TechCats

Self-Driving Cars

2017-12-08T06:32:00.001-08:00

Whenever I think about the idea of driverless cars, I always imagine explorers that lived hundreds of years ago and who were attempting to create ink and paper maps of the new worlds that they had discovered. I think of this because of the unfathomable amount of mapped data that has had to be collected for even the idea of driverless cars to be realized, mapping not only entire cities but every single square inch of that city’s roads. What would Louis and Clark have said if we told them there were people who drove around cars that took pictures of everything and everywhere and created a real-life map of our world? They’d probably say: “what’s a car?”

This is all in the wake of Lyft making the announcement yesterday that they’ll be rolling out their first batch of driverless cars to begin testing on. Lyft has partnered with a company called nuTonomy, which could give them the biggest edge on their competitors if the first rollout is successful.

In another major partnership, Honda just announced yesterday that it has come together with a Chinese startup called SenseTime. This company is best known for its object recognition technology and artificial intelligence, and this merger is indicative of Honda’s intentions to provide self-driving cars by 2020. Their focus in buying this company is to gain knowledge on “risk prediction, action planning, and scene understanding” to better serve urban areas with safe cars.

I’m interested to see how well they are able to achieve this, in assessing risk when it comes to such a human endeavor like driving. Driving and vehicles isn’t exactly a social issue, and I think analyzing data for risks in driving will yield better results than attempts to translate speech and tone from huge databases into concrete and meaningful output and answers. With so many companies announcing their intentions to roll out their own version of the self-driving car, I’m curious to see how long it will be before I myself ride in one. Maggie Wilcoxon

Final Team Blog Post

2017-12-07T15:52:00.003-08:00

As our semester is coming to a close, that means the TechCats blog is also coming to an end. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading through all of our blogs on various of topics like: IT security, uses of big data, agile methodology,and then how to retain special employees. Hopefully through these few posts it kept our readers up to date on current technological trends in the world and also sparked interest in them to do research on their own. As we come to a close, let's take a look at a recap of what all of our bloggers had to say.

Parker: My blog posts all had to do with IT security. Over the last few months the media has been really interested in IT security especially pertaining to our election. This media spotlight has really caught my attention and has inspired me to want to go into the field of IT security after I graduate. The more involved IT gets in our daily lives, the greater importance it is to protect our personal information. No system is perfect, everybody knows that. People will always be trying to find loopholes to exploit and to get access to information they shouldn't, like with the Equifax Data Breach that I blogged about. The field of IT security is constantly growing, and I hope to be apart of it one day. A small sample of this growth can be found in my first blog when I talked about HackerOne. HackerOne was a group of hackers that were paid to find loopholes in systems, then report them to the company so they could be fixed. Just this group alone has created over $20.2 million in revenues, and they expect it to grow to $200 million by 2020. Hopefully you enjoyed my blogs, thanks for reading.

Samantha: I really enjoyed getting the opportunity to dig deeper into aspects of IT and how management differs in that field. My posts covered the general topic of IT management, from the Agile methodology perspective to ways managers can improve employee morale and satisfaction. Everyone can be the best for the job for a day, week, or even months but if management doesn’t invest back into their employee’s productivity will decline tremendously. I can’t wait to get started with my career and use the skills and experience I’ve gained to help create a better working environment with motivated employees.

Maggie: As I researched more about some of the aspects and opportunities of Big Data, the more divided I realized the tech world is on this subject. While some claim that the idea of data analytics is the be-all end-all answer to all of life’s questions, some disagree. While I read articles and book excerpts about using data to solve problems like how to map the human genome and predict how cancers spread, I also found writers who don’t believe there is a single project that can truly lock down the specific data-to-end result chain of transactions. While this side of the argument recognize the usefulness of data, there are those who are less than impressed with the current applications of it and the publicity that it garners in the tech industry. Learning more specifics about the potentials in Big Data, as well as some of the less-than-starstruck opinions on the subject has been an interesting journey and has opened me up to a lot more resources in regards to technology news and information.

Overall, we hope this blog sparked some interest in people outside of our class to stay current in today's technological world. Being up to date on the latest technological advancements is becoming more important everyday as it becomes more and more intertwined into our daily lives. This fast paced technological world is upon us, and it's our job to stay educated on the latest trends.

Parker Fifield

Sam Zobel

Maggie Wilcoxon

Big Data: Is It the Answer To Every Question?

2017-12-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

I view the study of Big Data in a similar way that I see the study of economics, which tries to make mathematical and predictable sense of the human race. As Simon Chandler writes in an article for TechCrunch, “...[Big Data] will do little or nothing to alter the inherent subjectivity of the concepts used to divide this information into objects and relations.” Because computers don’t understand human concepts that can’t be reduced to ones and zeros, using databases and predictive analytics has failed in many projects attempting to answer questions about people and society. Economists are able to make exceptions in their models for the uncertainty of human behavior, but also attempts to use vast amounts of data to make predictions using formulas and numbers – using objective means to make subjective assertions.

The big focus on Big Data has been in marketing and advertising for businesses. Using data about past purchases, things that are purchased together, purchase timing, etc. etc. etc. Anything a business can collect information on. Although this has made huge changes in how products and coupons are advertised to consumers, the models that were created to produce those advertisements were created by humans or with major human input. Accurate models have to take into consideration the society and the culture of the person that they are targeting, and many other humanistic factors that can’t be directly translated into code.

When trying to predict when significant events (such as protests) were likely to happen, there were a number of huge database systems that came together to test their hypotheses. To test these systems, like the Lockheed Martin’s International Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) and Georgetown University’s Global Data on Events Language and Tone (GDELT), they measures how accurately they were able to predict protests in Latin America. They had mined news articles and social media to find trends, but found that the project ultimately failed with a little over 10% overlap. They largely attribute this to how “Automated systems can misclassify words.” Again bringing in the concept of subjectivity and trying to have a computer understand what is meant in tone, local dialects, and exaggeration.

While I think that Big Data is an incredibly exciting subject and will prove to be much more useful than the pessimists writing about it believe, I do agree that data alone will never be able to translate the human condition into binary. For Big Data to be useful and meaningful to areas that include any kind of human input, there has to be some kind of subjective influence. Until artificial intelligence is advanced enough to do away with human coders or developers, Big Data will be like typewriter keys with all of the paper and ink, and no author. Maggie Wilcoxon.

2017-12-02T18:04:00.001-08:00

How to retain specialized employees

In a world with ever-changing technology, it is becoming extremely common for employees to specialize in their roles. It is nothing new for managers to have to supervise people who know more than they do about certain areas of technology, but it is a whole new world when money just isn’t enough to keep the best employees around.

Managers may appreciate their specialized employees; they may even thank and praise them from time to time, but is a nice pat on the back still enough? What steps are they taking to show their best employees that they value their expertise?

If you’re a manager or aspiring one and you don’t know the answer to these questions, here are a few ideas:

· Make sure money is the root of any dissatisfaction – If you have truly maxed out the amount you are willing or able to pay your employees, this may not be the step for you. However, it seems careless not to ensure one of your prized employee, who’s earned better pay is getting it. This is no the be all end all solution to employee retention, when the employee has reached a satisfactory amount of money they will start to search for it in other areas.
· Value work-life balance – To assume being fully attentive at work is the most important aspect of your employee’s day is just plain naive. Due to emerging technologies the constrains of the traditional Monday through Friday 9 am – 5 pm work week have been eliminated. So, what is holding you back from giving your employees the flexibility to come in later or leave earlier in order to take the kids to school or indulge in their favorite hobbies?
· Make work fun – Not every day needs to be a circus act, but what’s the harm in having a little fun at the office? Plan monthly team outings, volunteer together, have a themed potluck. If your employees can have fun together they can be productive together. Removing some of the stuffy, formal work relationships will only boost office morale.
· Invest in career development and give them the opportunity to use it – You hire the best employees who will help you reach your business goals. They are staying with your company and organization when they likely have other options if they looked. Instead of using their knowledge and skills, invest in them as professionals. It will likely be one of the best returns you ever get on an investment.

I haven’t researched any science behind the ideas listed above, but I have experienced them personally. When your employees love coming into work each day, you’re doing something right. If you start to notice someone distancing themselves or having a couple rough weeks, it may be time to try something new.

Samantha Zobel

What is a DDoS attack?

2017-11-08T12:12:00.002-08:00

According to researchers at the University of Twent in Netherlands, University of California, San Diego and Saarland University in Germany, nearly one third of all active networks on the internet have experienced a DDoS attack at some point in the last two years, according to SecurityWeek. That accounts for nearly 21 million attacks and on average 28,700 per day DDoS attackers per day. These types of attacks today are becoming very common, and a major problem as these attacks become more sophisticated, which should make it a top priority for IT security teams.

What is a DDoS attack though? DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. The purpose of this attack is to attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple IP addresses. The main type of DDoS attack is a volumetric attack. It attempts to overload the network with so many requests that the network can't handle it. These types of attacks can shut down an entire website or severely reduce performance of the network. Other types of DDoS attacks are: TCP Connection Attacks, Fragmentation Attack, and Application Attack.

Most attacks are not originated from a singular computer. The attack is distributed through multiple computers and IP address. That is where the distributed part comes into play in the name. These attackers infect multiple computers with malicious software. These infected computers are known as “botnets”. All the infected computers can be controlled remotely and launch an attack at the same time on the same target. These attacks have become so popular that you can actually purchase a DDoS attack on a network, $150 gets you a week-long attack on a network of your choice.

How should a company go about defending their network against such a prevalent threat though? These are 5 good tips to helping you identify and thwart a DDoS attack

Identify the Attack Early. The earlier you identify the attack the sooner you can fight it off. Be familiar with your typical inbound traffic, so that you can notice when there is an uncharacteristic spike in traffic.
Overprovision your bandwidth. Have more bandwidth available than you actually need for your network.
Defend your network perimeter - limit your router to prevent the web server from being overwhelmed, add filters to your router, drop spoofed packages.
Call your internet provider and ask for help
Call a DDoS specialist for help

DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly popular, so it's vital that every company with an online presence is able to effectively fight one off. Make sure your company has a prepared emergency plan in case of a DDoS attack so that you aren't caught off guard for when this happens.

-Parker Fifield

What is an Agile Servant Leader?

2017-10-16T18:28:00.003-07:00

What is a servant leader anyway?

Like many of my college peers, I tend to catch myself in endless scrolling on social media, like Facebook and LinkedIn. As I would scroll, the phrase “Servant Leader” continually caught my eye in both posts by individual professionals and articles. I think it really caught my eye because it almost seems like an oxymoron, servant leader. Usually, when I think of a group of people there is one leader who sets the standard for the group, and the group works toward following that path and meeting the goals.

After doing a little research on this, I discovered that this concept was created by Robert Greenleaf in 1970. I was surprised it was never brought up in any of the leadership classes I have taken growing up, since it has been around for so long. Greenleaf’s idea is that a servant leader is a person makes the decision that they want to lead and who leads by serving their people. The leader can do this by listening, helping to alleviate problems slowing the team down. Not everyone is a servant leader, some leaders are called more to the power of the position than the opportunity to help the people following them.

So how does this philosophy affect or interact with the Agile Scrum project management methodology?

The primary goal of the agile methodology is to do less formal planning and producing multiple small versions of a product instead of just one final product. The whole philosophy behind the agile methodology is that there are several aspects of traditional project methods that can never been fully known prior to actually starting the project. To make the agile methods more united an Agile Manifesto was written. Within the manifesto are 12 principles, one of which is to “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” This environment is created and nurtured through positions like Project Owners and Scrum Masters. The scrum master’s job is to help facilitate and help alleviate “road blocks” incurred by developers or other members of the development team. The Product Owner is the representative between the client and the developers. These roles are rooted in the full meaning of servant leaders, their jobs are primarily laying the path between the clients and product team members.

Although, this philosophy can easily be applied to Agile’s scrum methodology but I think for many of the people in these roles it goes beyond that. This philosophy has the ability to have a real impact on society as a whole. If people outside of the IT and the agile methodology, take this idea heart they would see a dramatic result in employee satisfaction. Employees who feel like their boss actually cares, and is willing to take time out of their day to help them, are more likely to work harder and with more loyalty to the business than those with an unappreciative tone.

Samantha Zobel

Using Big Data to Beat Cancer

2017-09-29T16:41:00.000-07:00

When I had my first class in Management Information Systems back in my sophomore year of college, one of the most fascinating subjects to me was the concept of Big Data. I understood that the world is constantly producing and collecting more and more data, but I had never thought about the real possibilities of harnessing that data. Just like any other kind of science, researching and analyzing the data that computers allow us to collect can, and have, lead to huge breakthroughs.

The idea of using data to fight cancer first came to my attention when I was having a conversation with my boss about her son, who has been doing just that after graduating from [double check college with Mena]. In simple terms, he is working on a huge, and potentially life-changing project, to analyze the movement and growth of brain cancer cells. His team’s hypothesis is that they will be able to map out where the cancer is most likely to move into and understand the exact rate of growth in the cells when exposed to different forms of treatment. This is being done using an incredible amount of data taken from a sample of people with brain cancer, and could potentially change how all other cancers are researched and treated.

Other promising research projects are those across many countries that are attempting to fully map the human genome. In the US, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs’ is launching the Million Veteran Program (MVP) to create one of the largest databases of genetic research,to learn more about how genes affect health. With these massive efforts worldwide, it is estimated that by 2025 there will be data for as many as 2 billion sequenced human genomes. The expansion of these programs has been in response for a huge demand in medical and genetic data - which has changed how disease and treatment is handled from patient to patient.

The biggest challenge that these efforts are facing is that of freely available, consistent data. Medical data becomes a difficult responsibility due to privacy and consent laws, both nationally and internationally. Data sets are not easily shared on a large scale, and even when they are there is no current standard terms in which data is collected or recorded. According to Nancy Brinker and Elad Gil in their article, “Using Data Science to Beat Cancer”, three things need to happen to crack the medical data nut. Patients need to be able to freely share their data easily with a commonized form, there needs to be more funding for the development of data science and cancer, and simply more data sets need to be generated. These sets also need to focus on all ethnicities and relate to all humans.

While Big Data has become a huge promising star on the horizon of medical research, it is also huge and daunting project to tackle, and no one person, group, company, or country can take it on their own. Maggie Wilcoxon.

Equifax Data Breach

2017-09-11T09:40:00.001-07:00

On Thursday, Sept 7th, Equifax reported one of the largest data breaches in history had happened. They reported that up to 143 million Americans may have had their personal information compromised, including social security numbers, and home addresses. Along with that around 209,000 credit card numbers were also exposed. The breach had also spread to the U.K. and Canada. The hack occurred sometime between the middle of May and July. It wasn't discovered until July 29th. The worst part about this data breach is that most people have no idea that they are even customers of Equifax.

Equifax is a nationwide credit monitoring company. They develop credit scores for their customers based upon their financial history. This isn't a company you sign up for though to be a customer, they get their information through banks, credit card companies, retailers, and other financial businesses, often without you knowing. They then use this information to develop the credit score that you see online.

Equifax is doing their best to get ahead of this data breach but it seems to be fighting a losing battle. They are sending out letters to all of their customers that had their personal information compromised. They are also allowing customers to sign up for free credit file monitoring and identity theft protection for a year. They are actually offering this to all of their customers not just the ones that have been affected by the breach. No letter, or free credit monitoring will make up for the fallout of compromising millions of Americans personal information

How did this even happen? No one has taken responsibility for the hack yet, but Equifax says that the criminals “exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files.” Right now the New York Attorney General is investigating the breach. Along with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, The House of Financial Services Committee, and the House of Judiciary Committee.

What can we do now? CNN posted an article about 5 things you can do now to protect yourself. I have linked the article there but to summarize they talk about how you need to monitor your credit activity and put fraud alerts on your credit.

How can a type of breach like this be prevented? As I mentioned in my first blog Equifax could have hired HackerOne to help them prevent this type of breach. Your in house IT team can only find so many vulnerabilities and repair them. You are better off hiring a group of freelance hackers to look into your website and to see what they can find. When it comes to information as sensitive as this there is no price tag. Especially because I would imagine that Equifax will be paying a hefty fine for this breach, along with any potential lawsuits.

- Parker Fifield

HackerOne

2017-09-11T09:39:00.003-07:00

When you hear the word “hacker” most people have a negative connotation attached to it. They believe that is someone that steals information or “hacks” into a company and steals their secrets. Then when I tell you that a company called HackerOne believes that they will reach $100 million in what they call “bounties paid out” by 2020 from their business you probably think they are stealing and selling secrets. Not quite.

In today's world with all of information that is stored on the internet it has become extremely important to protect all of this information. This has created a new field of jobs for people that get referred to as hackers.They get paid to “hack” into people’s personal stuff, companies, or even government's databases and steal critical information then sell it to competitors that could be interested in this. Everyday there seems to be another breaking story that some big name companies security has been compromised by a foreign hacker. Or that our election may have been compromised by Russian hackers. Everyday it's something new, how does a company prevent their information prevent this?

This is where HackerOne takes a different spin with that name. HackerOne is a company that you hire to try to hack into your system. Why would you do this? Its simple, to find out where you're exposed.

How it works is that when you hire HackerOne, they start to invite their own freelance hackers. These hackers are trusted individuals that work independently and are incentivized by the company to find critical vulnerabilities. These hackers aren't here to steal the information they are here as security experts. These hackers use their own bugs or applications to try to get into the client's web site or database. After they have done so they deliver their own reports to the company and get paid their “bounty”. The bounty is their payment for finding out the weaknesses in the website.

HackerOne is used to supplement your in house security team. That in house security team can only find so much. Why not add an extra couple hundred eyes? There are going to be hackers poking through your site not matter what, why not have these hackers working for you so you can limit the exposure. This “hacker-powered security” has become so popular they currently have fixed over 52,000 bugs and $20.2 bounties have been paid out. They currently work with: General Motors, Starbucks,Uber, Spotify, and even the United States Department of Defense just to name a few.

Everyday there seems to be a new threat to our security, but it finally seems like there are effective ways to combat this new sensation of hackers. With HackerOne leading the way in Information Security.

- Parker Fifield

Welcome

2017-08-28T07:47:00.002-07:00

Welcome to our blog!

The purpose of the TechCats is to post and discuss current and interesting topics in the tech world. We are a group of seniors majoring in Management Information Systems at the University of Northern Iowa, and will posting to this site over the course of the 2017-2018 Fall semester. Our names are Parker Fifield, Samantha Zobel, and Maggie Wilcoxon.

Parker Fifield is a senior at UNI. He is a double major in MIS and Finance. He currently works part-time for Hy-Vee as an assistant manager. Parker plans on blogging about the latest in IT security. Parker enjoys spending his free time being active outdoors. Parker is also an avid Cubs fan and plans on going to the World Series at Wrigley field this year if they make it that far. After college Parker hopes to enter the field of IT security but is also open to other opportunities to start his career.

Samantha is a senior MIS and Finance double major at UNI. She currently works for Far Reach Technologies and the Cedar Falls Police Department. In her free time, she enjoys reading and hanging out with family and friends. Samantha intends to blog about ways graduates can set themselves up for their career, as well as IT management philosophies.

Maggie Wilcoxon is majoring in MIS, and has a minor in Economics. Outside of school she works in the Quality Systems division at John Deere. When she isn’t at school or work, Maggie enjoys doing anything active and anything outdoors. She also spends a lot of her time cooking and baking, and reading whenever she has any free time. Maggie plans to blog about the world of Big Data - what’s being done with it, how the world is changing around it, and how it will affect the future of every industry.

In the ever evolving tech world, there are hundreds of different topics to discuss and read about. The goal of this blog is to scratch the surface of just a few of these topics, and inform you of some of our personal interests that are coming out of our field of study. We hope you find these posts intriguing and informational, and that cause you to go out and do more research on your own.

Stay tuned for posts from each of us coming soon!