Underwater Hacker Missile Wars: A Cryptography and Engineering Contest

For a recent student conference, the authors developed a day-long design problem and competition suitable for engineering, mathematics and science undergraduates. The competition included a cryptography problem, for which a workshop was run during the conference. This paper describes the competition, focusing on the cryptography problem and the workshop. Notes from the workshop and code for the computer programs are made available via the Internet. The results of a personal self-evaluation (PSE) are described.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, uses amsrefs.sty v2.0 and cryptologiabib.sty (included); to appear in Cryptologi

Music in democratic education: an evaluation of publications of committees, councils, and commissions of the National Education Association of the United States

Thesis (D.M.A.)--Boston University

Understanding Diverse Pathways: Disciplinary Trajectories of Engineering Students: Year 3- NSF REE Grant 1129383

Engineering as a whole continues to suffer from a low participation of women of all races andBlack, Hispanic, and Native American men. To diversify pathways for students to and throughengineering and to improve student success, we must first know how to measure success andprovide baseline data describing the current situation for all students. Our previous work hasshown that persistence or success varies by race and gender, and how we measure persistencematters in understanding this variation. Once women matriculate in engineering, they graduate insix-years at the same or better rates than their male counterparts of all races. This finding,however, shows considerable variation by engineering subdiscipline. Aggregating allengineering disciplines tends to produce a skewed view of the field given the large numbers ofstudents in Electrical and Mechanical engineering. Disaggregation by race and gender isimperative because not all populations respond the same way to similar conditions. Building onearlier findings that trajectories of engineering persistence are non-linear, gendered, andracialized as a whole and for electrical and computer engineering, we are extending theseanalyses to other engineering disciplines. Using an existing dataset that includes wholepopulation data from eleven institutions throughout the U.S. spanning more than 20 years, wehave an unprecedented opportunity to conduct analyses of student persistence disaggregated byrace, gender, and engineering discipline. This gives us a unique opportunity to paint a morecomplete picture of the current situation for students in engineering and to identify successes andareas of concern. Our research question is How do the trajectories of engineering students indifferent engineering disciplines vary by race and gender? Trajectories are measured atmatriculation, four years later, and six-year graduation for matriculants to the disciplines as wellas all students in the major, including first-time-in-college (FTIC) and transfer students. Theimpact of first-year engineering (FYE) programs is also considered. We focus on the mostpopular disciplines of engineering: Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Mechanical, and Industrial. Inaddition, we have considered Aerospace Engineering given its similarity in curriculum toMechanical and Computer Engineering given its similar curriculum to Electrical. We have begunto work on comparisons of the five most popular engineering disciplines

The pathways and performance of undergraduate engineering transfer students

Transfer students account for a large percentage of the postsecondary population. Although several transfer pathways exist, much of the existing literature centers on the vertical track, or student transfer from a two-year to a four-year university, while overlooking the much-traveled lateral pathway between two institutions of a similar type (i.e., from one two- or four-year institution to another). Additionally, few studies exclusively concentrate on the shrinking pool of students majoring in the engineering fields, which may prove problematic for the future of the United States’ economy if recruitment strategies are not improved. The present paper, which is part of a larger mixed-method study, presents the results of a descriptive study of the student pathways and performance of undergraduate transfer engineering students at eleven participating universities. We report the initial descriptive characteristics of 126 students at four of the four-year study institutions. Results show that 46% of the students in our sample laterally transferred in from another four-year school, a large percentage compared to the relatively rare consideration of lateral transfer students in the existing literature. The study results should be of interest to faculty, staff and policy makers interested in improving the retention and success of transfer students in engineering

Optimizing Student Team Skill Development using Evidence-Based Strategies—NSF Award 1431694

Optimizing Student Team Skill Development using Evidence‐Based Strategies NSF Award 1431694 The broad goal of this work is to study the effectiveness of various teamwork training interventions. This research requires the use of a common model of teamwork and a system for training, collecting ratings data, and providing feedback. We will leverage the NSF’s prior investment in the CATME system, which meets the research criteria and automates some of the data collection and feedback, which will aid in executing the research protocol consistently. Seven empirical studies will determine the effect sizes of training, practice in teams, practice rating, and feedback interventions on cognitive development (improvement of team skills) and metacognitive development (improvement of self‐ and peer‐evaluation skills). Outcomes. We focus both on cognitive skills related to team‐member effectiveness and on metacognitive skills that enable competent self‐ and peer‐evaluation of team members’ effectiveness. An intermediate knowledge‐level outcome affects both—developing an improved cognitive model of teamwork. Students must learn what skills are necessary for effective teamwork to be able to develop and evaluate them. Strategies. To achieve these outcomes, we have several strategies. Frame‐of‐reference training, which is well‐established and empirically supported, will align students’ cognitive model of teamwork with ours by teaching students the ways team members can contribute effectively to teams in the five key areas summarized earlier. Experience working in teams and evaluating teamwork will improve team skills and self‐ and peer‐evaluation skills. Experience in teams increases as students work on multiple teams. Rating practice will be accomplished by showing students descriptions or videotapes of fictitious team members and having them rate the contributions these fictitious team members make, in addition to rating themselves and their real teammates following work in teams. Finally, we will examine how the degree to which and manner in which feedback on team skills is provided affect student outcomes

The Rapid Adoption of SMARTER Teamwork Tools: the System for Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation for Teamwork

The Rapid Adoption of SMARTER Teamwork Tools: the System for Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation for TeamworkThe rapid adoption of Team-Maker and the Comprehensive Assessment of Team MemberEffectiveness (CATME) tools for team formation and peer evaluation make it possible to extendtheir success to have a significant impact on the development of team skills in higher education.As of October 19, 2014, the web-based systems have been used by more than 300,000 studentsof more than 6000 faculty at more than 1100 institutions in 59 countries—the figure belowshows the growth of the user base at the end of September.This paper and its accompanying poster will describe progress toward broadening the scope ofthose tools into a complete system for the management of teamwork in undergraduate education.The System for the Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediationof Teamwork (SMARTER Teamwork) has three specific goals: 1) to equip students to work inteams by providing them with training and feedback, 2) to equip faculty to manage student teamsby providing them with information and tools to facilitate best practices, and 3) to equipresearchers to understand teams by broadening the system’s capabilities to collect additionaltypes of data so that a wider range of research questions can be studied through a secureresearcher interface. The three goals of the project support each other in hierarchical fashion:research informs faculty practice, faculty determine the students’ experience, which, if wellmanaged based on research findings, equips students to work in teams. Our strategies forachieving these goals are based on a well-accepted training model that has five elements:information, demonstration, practice, feedback, and remediation.The paper that will be submitted and the poster presented at the conference will focus on newfeatures of the system, the development of training materials, and the deployment of a partnerwebsite that shares information about the SMARTER tools for teamwork and provides basicinformation about teamwork and team management. The observed growth is both penetrationinto the original target market and growth into unexpected markets

Unsupervised authorship analysis of phishing webpages

Authorship analysis on phishing websites enables the investigation of phishing attacks, beyond basic analysis. In authorship analysis, salient features from documents are used to determine properties about the author, such as which of a set of candidate authors wrote a given document. In unsupervised authorship analysis, the aim is to group documents such that all documents by one author are grouped together. Applying this to cyber-attacks shows the size and scope of attacks from specific groups. This in turn allows investigators to focus their attention on specific attacking groups rather than trying to profile multiple independent attackers. In this paper, we analyse phishing websites using the current state of the art unsupervised authorship analysis method, called NUANCE. The results indicate that the application produces clusters which correlate strongly to authorship, evaluated using expert knowledge and external information as well as showing an improvement over a previous approach with known flaws. © 2012 IEEE

Authorship attribution for Twitter in 140 characters or less

Authorship attribution is a growing field, moving from beginnings in linguistics to recent advances in text mining. Through this change came an increase in the capability of authorship attribution methods both in their accuracy and the ability to consider more difficult problems. Research into authorship attribution in the 19th century considered it difficult to determine the authorship of a document of fewer than 1000 words. By the 1990s this values had decreased to less than 500 words and in the early 21 st century it was considered possible to determine the authorship of a document in 250 words. The need for this ever decreasing limit is exemplified by the trend towards many shorter communications rather than fewer longer communications, such as the move from traditional multi-page handwritten letters to shorter, more focused emails. This trend has also been shown in online crime, where many attacks such as phishing or bullying are performed using very concise language. Cybercrime messages have long been hosted on Internet Relay Chats (IRCs) which have allowed members to hide behind screen names and connect anonymously. More recently, Twitter and other short message based web services have been used as a hosting ground for online crimes. This paper presents some evaluations of current techniques and identifies some new preprocessing methods that can be used to enable authorship to be determined at rates significantly better than chance for documents of 140 characters or less, a format popularised by the micro-blogging website Twitter1. We show that the SCAP methodology performs extremely well on twitter messages and even with restrictions on the types of information allowed, such as the recipient of directed messages, still perform significantly higher than chance. Further to this, we show that 120 tweets per user is an important threshold, at which point adding more tweets per user gives a small but non-significant increase in accuracy. © 2010 IEEE

Optimizing Student Team Skill Development Using Evidence-Based Strategies

The critical importance of effective teamwork in engineering is widely recognized. Surprisingly, however, relatively little is known about how to develop teamwork skills in higher education classes, including what factors contribute to effective teamwork, their relative importance in a team\u27s overall performance, and the underlying individual and interpersonal dynamics. Increasing numbers of engineering instructors are adopting instructional practices relying on teamwork, yet many instructors simply form student teams and hope the members individually and collectively learn on their own how to work in teams and succeed in their task(s). Instructors do this because they do not have guidance for a better approach. This research project aims to address this gap in faculty knowledge. The empirical studies conducted as part of this project build on research in engineering education, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and other fields in a coordinated large-scale research project that will provide faculty with needed knowledge and tools to ensure that students learn team skills. The research team is conducting seven separate studies measuring the impact of teamwork training, experience working in teams, practice rating the teamwork of fictitious team members, and giving and receiving peer feedback. The research is measuring each of these effects in real teams on three learning outcomes: improved teamwork knowledge, improved ability to evaluate teamwork, and improved ability to function effectively in teams. These studies will result in practical recommendations for time-pressed faculty to implement