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Nationally recognized TU cyber programs expanding in 2020

January 8, 2020

The University of Tulsa’s national reputation as a leader in computer science and cybersecurity education spans more than two decades, and in 2020, TU is poised to launch a new wave of opportunities that will benefit students, faculty, local educators and the entire cybersecurity industry.

Cyber Summit 2020

Last year, TU introduced a cybersecurity conference unlike any other in the country. The Tulsa Cyber Summit welcomed students, executives, entrepreneurs and innovators for high-profile keynotes such as former CIA Director John Brennan, Facebook Security Director Aanchal Gupta and Team8 Founder and CEO Nadav Zafrir, as well as workshops and panel discussions with more than 40 leaders and executives in the cybersecurity industry.

Organizers are preparing for an even bigger conference March 22-24, 2020, at the Cox Convention Center in downtown Tulsa. The event will spotlight Tulsa’s emerging cyber industry and the valuable relationship TU holds with local and national cyber partners. Learn more about this year’s program and register to attend at utulsa.edu/cybercon.

“This year’s Cyber Summit is multi-focal,” said event organizer and Tandy School of Computer Science Chair John Hale. “We will continue the dual leadership and technology tracks, but also are incorporating a mini-track dedicated to cyber insurance, a thread of talks that will be of special relevance to small and medium-sized enterprises, and a panel on gender and diversity issues in the cyber workforce. In addition, we will welcome a group of national cyber experts as this year’s keynote speakers.”

TU-Team8 Cyber Fellows

Also new in 2020, TU is joining forces with the Tel Aviv, Israel-based cyber venture creation firm Team8 to establish the TU-Team8 Cyber Fellows program for doctoral students in the College of Engineering and Natural Sciences. The program is designed for students seeking to advance cyber R&D across security, big data and artificial intelligence, creating new methods and commercially viable solutions that enable a secure and productive all-digital future.

Funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the cyber fellowship program provides full financial support for 10 STEM-related doctoral degrees at TU to develop research projects that have the potential to fundamentally impact the world. Students receive free tuition, an annual living stipend/salary, TU graduate student benefits and a $20,000 bonus if they stay in Tulsa for at least two years after graduation.

TU’s rich history in cyber education and expertise combined with Team8’s ability to identify big problems and assemble the team, ecosystem and capital to drive a solution will prepare students with the cyber resilience and data science capabilities to enact a worldwide digital transformation.

The Ph.D. program officially begins in fall 2020. Students can apply by contacting Rose Gamble, Tandy Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, at gamble@utulsa.edu.

MS Cybersecurity Online

TU’s master of science in cybersecurity online degree has produced its first two graduates. Aaron Arneson, a U.S. Air Force civilian employee, and Jon Clemenson, director of information security at 10th Magnitude, graduated in December 2019 and will use their TU graduate degrees to advance their cybersecurity careers. The TU online program is designed for working professionals seeking to gain the skills and expertise necessary to thrive in the growing cyber field. The curriculum can be completed in 24 months, and students can continue to work as full-time professionals while completing their degree.

To apply to the program or for more details, contact Randy Roberts, program business manager, at 918-631-6523 or rsr1451@utulsa.edu.

CyberCity

Just announced, TU will debut the multi-year CyberCity program in the summer of 2020 to infuse cyber education into every school and eventually every classroom in the Tulsa metropolitan area. The initiative will energize a generation of students to transform the city and its economy.

CyberCity also is sponsored by the George Kaiser Family Foundation and will be led by Sujeet Shenoi, professor of computer science and chemical engineering and founder of TU’s Cyber Corps, along with Kimberly Adams, Chapman Senior Instructor of Mathematics. Four week-long workshops will be held in June and July for elementary and middle school teachers. Enrollment in each week’s workshop will cap at 36. Groups of teachers from Tulsa-area schools are encouraged to participate in a workshop to create critical mass, foster collaborative efforts during the academic year and add cyber curricula and activities to their schools.

Workshop topics will include cybersecurity concepts and best practices, online safety, cyber ethics, computer gaming, the Internet of Things, robot and drone programming as well as the critical infrastructure, cryptography and coding involved in Python programming language. Each teacher will receive a $600 stipend, Raspberry Pi with a keyboard and mouse, flash drive with instructional materials, lockbox kit and the book “Cracking Codes with Python: An Introduction to Building and Breaking Cyphers.”

“We envision enabling a generation of cyber-savvy ‘tinkerers’ and innovators capable of changing the city’s economic base,” Shenoi said. “This is something we should do if we want to change our city.”

TU will support teachers throughout the school year with an interactive web platform to share ideas and ask questions, creating an online community that fosters collaboration in developing lesson plans and other learning materials.

Find more information and sign up for the program by contacting Kimberly Adams at kimberly-adams@utulsa.edu or Sujeet Shenoi at sujeet@utulsa.edu.

SIDEBAR: Competitive student learning events

For undergraduate and graduate cyber students, competitive events are an annual highlight of the academic year that demonstrate their talent, skillsets and potential as future professionals.

2019

In the summer of 2019, TU students collaborated with Professor of Computer Science Sandip Sen to design, develop, implement, test and field an agent that could perform repeated negotiations with human partners to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. The agent, named Draft Agent based on the core negotiating protocol used, was entered into the Human-Agent League of the Tenth International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition at IJCAI 2019, Aug. 10-16, in Macao, China. One of TU’s two entries was named a finalist and later the official winner, receiving a cash prize of $250.

TU students finished second at the 2019 Central Region Collegiate Pen Testing Competition (CPTC) Oct. 12-13 at Tennessee Tech. The event focuses on improving the offensive security posture of a fictitious organization and reporting on risks in a manner that is similar to a real professional environment. Students participate as part of an in-house red team, a consulting firm providing penetration testing services or an information security analyst to hone the technical, communication and collaboration skills they will use as professionals.

On Nov. 11, a group of students participated in the south-central regional event for the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Both TU teams finished at or near the top of the Oklahoma rankings and in the top third of the 60 total teams that competed. Team Aleph Naught placed first in the state and #11 in the region, and team Turing Tested received third place in Oklahoma and #20 in the region.

Nov. 29-Dec. 1, the Tandy School of Computer Science virtually hosted the TU Capture the Flag (CTF) information security competition. Around 1,000 teams from around the globe participated in the community-oriented event that featured high school and collegiate brackets. Capture The information security competition requires teams to solve a series of challenges to prepare students for careers in digital security.

2020

In 2020, TU students will attend the Information Security Talent Search Feb. 28-30 at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. The event is an annual three-day cyber attack/defend competition, challenging students to solve scenarios in computing security, system administration, networking and programming. Competitors engage in code review, architecture design, incident response and policy writing while defending a student-built infrastructure.

One of the most anticipated student events of the year is the Southwest Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) Regional, March 20-22. Hosted on TU’s campus, the regional CCDC event requires students to assume administrative and protective duties for an existing “commercial” network. The eight regional CCDC winners will compete in the national competition April 16-18.

Other upcoming events include the AI, Creativity and Copyright conference March 27 and an annual high-performance computing competition on TU’s campus in April. The AI symposium will involve a panel discussion on the complicated idea of who owns copyright to the music an artificial intelligence system generates. This is complicated by the fact that machines cannot currently generate or own copyrights under U.S. law. The discussion will be followed by a hackathon in which student programmers create AI-driven music pieces. The event will conclude with a talk by one of the lead AI experts at Pandora music.

Electrical engineering interns power up for job prospects

August 27, 2019

Juniors and seniors in The University of Tulsa’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have a 100% internship and job placement rate. That means all May 2019 graduates are employed in the industry, and all incoming seniors have either concluded or are still working an internship.

A competitive edge

How important is an internship when setting off on the right foot after college? It’s everything, said Kaveh Ashenayi, Hans S. Norberg Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Ashenayi, who also serves as department chair, believes that young graduates with engineering experience have a competitive edge over others who do not. “It’s easier to get a job after graduation and experiencing what it’s like to work as an engineer makes a student more desirable to employ,” said Douglas Jussaume, applied associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

That’s why Ashenayi and his faculty sat around a table two years ago and set the lofty goal to find an internship for each junior and senior in the department. “We wanted to find honest-to-goodness engineering internships where students worked on actual projects at local companies,” he said.

Faculty tapped into their industry networks, made dozens of calls at Tulsa-area companies and connected students with electrical engineering mentors. Some students received three-month summer internships while others arranged for year-round positions, allowing them to work part time during the semester and full time in the summer. “We are trying to distinguish ourselves by obtaining internships for seniors, juniors, sophomores and even the freshmen,” Ashenayi said. “Many of the students are eventually hired full time where they interned.”

For all faculty and staff in the department that includes a senior class of less than 30 students, helping young engineers complete their degrees and start their careers is the ultimate reward after hundreds of hours spent teaching, advising and mentoring. “When they get internships, their self-confidence goes up,” said department administrative assistant Marla Zumwalt. “They begin to see how what they’ve learned in class can be used in the real world.”

Mason Holley, John Zink Hamworthy Combustion

Internships also provide exposure to different work environments, interaction with coworkers and customer service, said senior Mason Holley who interned this summer at John Zink Hamworthy Combustion in Tulsa. “I picked up a lot of soft skills and learned how the business aspect of engineering is a lot bigger than I realized,” Holley said. “You can build something, but if no one buys the product, what’s the point?”

Holley’s technical work involved embedded systems and hardware, but he also gave presentations to business leaders, took a speech class offered through the company and soaked in the advice he received from two company mentors who are TU alumni. “Everyone I bumped into was helpful and knowledgeable and that impressed me,” he said.

As Holley returns to campus for his senior year, he begins the semester knowing he has a job locked down at John Zink if he chooses to stay in Oklahoma. “They extended a job offer to me,” he said. “I haven’t decided yet if I want to go to grad school, but it’s pretty exciting and a relief to know that I already have something lined up. It’s a weight off my shoulders.”

Caitlyn Daxon, Cymstar

Holley is not the only TU intern to receive a job offer. Senior Caitlyn Daxon has interned at Cymstar since March 2019 and has the option to work there full time in the future. Although there aren’t many engineers in her family, she excelled in math and participated in Project Lead the Way as a student at Union High School in Tulsa. This summer, she has helped Cymstar employees overhaul the website that manages and communicates all company projects. She has shadowed engineers, learned about the accounting skills they often use in projects and explored the inner workings of Cymstar’s flight systems. “Engineering is very hands-on, so you don’t know what you want to do without experiencing it first,” Daxon said.

Taylor Deru, Enovation Controls

“All of the professors have been very adamant and persistent with us on internship applications and helping us make connections,” said senior Taylor Deru who just finished a summer position with Tulsa’s Enovation Controls. The Houston native joined an office of longtime employees with decades of engineering experience. His tasks included troubleshooting faulty systems reported by customers and various testing with circuit boards, displays and electronic components.

“Once you move into a professional setting, you realize the point of a degree is to learn the fundamentals such as math, physics, circuits and electrical components,” Deru said. “A degree teaches you to think critically and how to solve problems, but there’s a lot you aren’t able to learn in academics. An internship is a very valuable sneak peek at what’s to come after college.”

Patrick Maley, Aaon

Patrick Maley’s internship at Aaon began in July, and, as a junior, he plans to continue working part time throughout the semester. Right away, he was handed a program used in the company’s HVAC systems and instructed to test inputs/outputs and communications on the product’s circuit board. “It’s about ironed out,” Maley said, “I’ve learned how much responsibility is needed in product and design.”

His assigned Aaon mentor, Senior Electrical Controls Engineer Thomas Burrow, said Maley’s product design was so good that it was sent to manufacturing, exceeding the skillset and quality of an entry-level engineer. “I would trust Patrick to go into any meeting and represent any department,” Burrow said. “When there are employees with 40 years of experience in the room picking apart a design, that can be intimidating, but TU interns are well-spoken and can handle the criticism.”

Burrow explained Aaon often uses the internship as a job interview and, considering Maley’s outstanding performance review, the odds are in his favor. If he chooses to join the industry after his undergraduate degree, a position awaits him. However, Maley still has two years of coursework remaining at TU, and although he’s keeping his options open right now, he knows he’s in the right field. “Electricity is badass, and I wanted a career that allowed me to help people,” he said. “Choosing electrical engineering was the best decision of my life.”

Around 20 local companies hosted TU electrical engineering interns in 2019. Ashenayi said the department is working on a new goal for next summer: to find internships for all freshmen and sophomores, too.

True Cybersecurity: TU hosts Tulsa Cyber Summit, wins CCDC regional

March 29, 2019

Students, executives and innovators convened in Tulsa March 24-26 for a weekend of events centered on competition and exploration in the field of cybersecurity. The True Blue University of Tulsa community was instrumental in hosting the Southwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC), followed by the first-ever Tulsa Cyber Summit, a national cybersecurity conference for students, executives, entrepreneurs and innovators.

2019 Southwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition

TU’s CCDC team won first place at the southwest regional event, hosted on the TU campus, and will advance to the national competition April 23-25 in Orlando, Florida. CCDC gives college students the opportunity to apply real-world technical and business skills before graduating. Simulated situations prepare students for real scenarios they will encounter later in their careers as each team is responsible for securing, managing and maintaining the network infrastructure of a fabricated small business.

TU’s 2019 CCDC team members include Team Captain Kyle Cook (computer science), Michaela Conn and Brian Kwiecinski (computer information systems), Abraham Habib (information technology) and Tabor Kvasnicka, Hannah Robbins, Rachel Porter and Meaghan Longenberger (computer science). Sal Aurigemma, Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems, is the team’s coach.

Tulsa Cyber Summit

During the same weekend, TU, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and Cox Business teamed up to welcome cybersecurity specialists and innovators from around the country to the Tulsa Cyber Summit. The conference featured high-profile keynotes including former CIA Director John Brennan, Facebook Security Director Aanchal Gupta, Team8 Founder and CEO Nadav Zafrir and more than 40 other leaders and executives in the cybersecurity industry.

Hosted at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tulsa, the event included breakout sessions centered around leadership and technology in the cyber sector as well as trends and challenges in the areas of transportation, energy, electricity, finance and IoT governance.

“The University of Tulsa has been a leader in cybersecurity for more than two decades,” said Tyler Moore, Tandy Associate Professor of Cyber Security & Information Assurance. “Until now, we’ve been somewhat of a best-kept secret. Many of the students and alumni we’ve trained have gone on to the highest levels of government service, academia and industry. There’s a tremendous opportunity to leverage the expertise and talent that we have at the university in building a future economy that is diversified and that can make a significant difference to our nation’s security.”

Cybersecurity in Tulsa

TU’s partnership with GKFF and Cox Business elevated Tulsa’s national exposure as a center of cybersecurity education, entrepreneurship and innovation. The Tulsa Cyber Summit enhances the city’s growing community of energy, manufacturing, technology and aerospace industries.

TU’s Tandy School of Computer Science holds three cyber designations by the National Security Agency and produces many of the nation’s top experts in cyber operations, cyber defense and research while preparing students to fill critical roles at organizations such as the U.S. Department of Defense, NSA, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Transportation and National Institute of Justice. The university also offers several computer science and cybersecurity degree options, including an exclusive online master’s program for professionals.

“Tulsa is putting its name on the map and has for many years as far as being a center of excellence on cybersecurity and IT matters,” Brennan said. “I believe that academic environment is so important because the next generation of Americans, the students at The University of Tulsa, are the ones that need to pick up this mantel and address the challenges that we face as a nation.”

Thousands of cybersecurity jobs that require the skills of a qualified cyber professional remain unfilled across the United States, and the U.S. military’s cyber defense capabilities indicate areas of weakness in protecting the country from potential adversaries. As the backdrop for the new Tulsa Enterprise for Cyber Innovation, Talent and Entrepreneurship Cyber District, the city of Tulsa is primed to prepare the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

Stay up-to-date with our True Blue stories or read the Tulsa World’s coverage of the Tulsa Cyber Summit.

True Service: Cycling for a cause

August 14, 2018

Geology junior Grant Morey of St. Louis is wrapping up a summer-long cycling excursion from Virginia to Oregon, constructing homes with the organization Bike & Build. A competitive road racer, Morey said the project presented an opportunity to ride across America with purpose. The service-oriented cycling trip engages young adults with organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, Rebuilding Together, YouthBuild and local nonprofits while raising awareness of the need for affordable housing. Participants ride an average of 66 miles per day while relying on the generous hearts of churches, community centers and schools for food, rest and showers.

Students empowered to serve

Morey’s desire to combat one of America’s leading social issues is a common attitude among the TU student population. The TU community empowers students to get involved and make a difference in the lives of those struggling in their home towns and around the world.

“In Tulsa, I’m in contact with homeless people all the time, and it’s just heartbreaking to see,” Morey said. “Hopefully, by the end of the trip, I will have made some sort of difference. I hope it’s life changing.”

Morey’s adventures on a bike began when he found Tulsa’s cycling community as a TU freshman. During a local group ride one evening, he made several friends who became cycling mentors.

“I have two lives — one here at school and one out cycling,” Morey said. “It takes a lot of my time, but I just love getting outside, pushing myself and hanging out with new people. It’s just a great sport.”

Morey is primarily a road cyclist with category 4 racing status, but he hopes to improve his rating to a 3 by the end of the year. Tulsa is home to several annual cycling festivals such as Tulsa Tough that offer an array of criterium races, but he said he prefers the open road. “I’m more of a road race guy — longer distances with some hills. I like the idea of an endurance challenge.”

Cycling in Tulsa

He averages about 10 hours a week on his GURU bike that he has carefully upgraded for performance, joking that it “is probably nicer than my car.” Between maintenance and travel to rides, Morey devotes anywhere from 15 to 20 hours a week to cycling at some of his favorite locations such as Riverside and the hills north of the city.

“Tulsa is a great area to ride because you can get out to the open roads quick,” he said. “There’s not a lot of traffic, and it’s a great community for cycling.”

Morey also is a regular at Tulsa’s Wednesday night rides that attract hundreds of cyclists each week. This spring, he spent almost every weekend racing competitively within the region. Morey said cycling helps relieve the worries and stress of a demanding school schedule.

“For anybody interested in riding, I’m always happy to talk to them or ride with them,” he said. “You just have to find the right people to help you along and get started.”

Watch from earlier this spring as Morey discusses cycling in Tulsa and the Bike and Build project.

Once Morey concludes his Bike & Build tour in mid-August, he plans to study abroad this fall in Copenhagen and research glaciers in Greenland. In addition to his degree in geology, he is earning minors in environmental policy and philosophy to prepare for graduate school and a career in the Earth sciences field.

“I love being outside, and I’ve always loved math and science,” Morey said. “I want to do something that helps the Earth or helps me understand it better.”

After choosing TU for its small size and comfortable distance from his St. Louis home, Morey is now certainly True Blue, falling in love with the campus, the city and the sport of road racing.

Learn more about Morey’s journey across the United States or follow the Bike & Build group on Instagram at #cus18.