From the abstract: Every organization needs to communicate with its audience, and social media is an attractive and inexpensive way to maintain dialogic communication. About 1/3 of the Internet web pages are powered by WordPress, and about a million companies have moved their IT infrastructure to the AWS cloud. Together, AWS and WordPress offer an attractive, effective and inexpensive way for companies, both large and small, to maintain their presence on the web.
This paper starts from the following premise:
you have been hired by a company with a small Communication budget, but ambitious plans. You have been tasked with setting up an effective web presence; in this role you have to combine both your CS/IT skills, as well as your Communication savvy. The decision has been made to deploy the web page as WordPress hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), integrated with social media, as well as robust Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your communication campaigns.
From introduction to WordPress on AWS: a Communication Framework
This paper is a third paper in a sequence on cloudification with AWS; the first one, Cloudifying the Curriculum with AWS, can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04020, and it was mentioned in this blog post, the second on Cybersecurity in the Cloud here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.12905, and it was mentioned in this blog post.
A message from the Chair of Computer Science and Information Technology to our graduating class 2020!
Computer Science and Information Technology Graduating class of 2020:
Over the last years you have worked very hard, and with your resolve and commitment you have obtained one of the “best” most viable degrees: Computer Science and Information Technology.
Along the way you have acquired hard technical skills, but also very important so called “soft” skills, although there is nothing “soft” about them, such as persuasion, empathy, work discipline, the ability to see things through.
Now you are going to start a new chapter, one that is even more exciting than university: work in your field. I am going to borrow from Frank Hanna’s great book, A Graduate’s Guide to Life, with subtitle Three things they don’t teach you in College that could make all the difference, and give you 3 secrets to success:
A quote form Josef Jungmann “education is the process of introducing a person to reality”. Continue to strive to see things as they really are; not as you wish them to be, not in a way that makes you feel better, but in a way that they truly are. Let your decisions and plans be measured by reality.
Watch any nature show and you will see the animals competing. They compete for food, water, pawer, respect. And we human beings belong to the animal kingdom, but we are also civilized (the word means not acting like animals). Most scientists concur that over the past 10 thousand years we have built an increasingly prosperous and sophisticated civilization via cooperation, not competition. So the second piece of advice is that you chose collaboration over competition.
Is Bill Gates wealthy? What if I told you that Bill Gates just found out that he has one day to live (Steve Jobs, founder of Apple was in that place). Is he still wealthy? How much do you think he would pay for 10 more years? The proper understanding of wealth is that it is a measure of our well-being, most accurately measured in the quality of our human capital (you just made a huge investment in your human capital by obtaining a degree) and relationships (not talking about shallow networking here), and the hope and expectations of those relationships. The secret of life, and indeed the secret of wealth, is to enter into good relationships with others!
Let me summarize; as you leave our campus and start your career:
Let your decisions and plans be measured by reality
Choose collaboration over competition
The secret of life (and wealth) is to enter into good relationships with others
In light of the 3rd piece of advice, please stay connected, with each other and with your professors. LinkedIn estimates that 80% of jobs are found through one’s network. But more importantly, it is crucial to stay in touch with those with whom you share an important part of your past → your school friends. Please stay connected with your instructors, especially with those you grew closer with, and with the university through its alumni program. As a young university we have a small alumni group, but it is such an important group, especially for the new students, so they can witness that at the end of all the work and dedication there is a better life for them, their families, and their communities.
The Computer Science 6th Advisory Board meeting on Zoom on May 18, 2020.
most Important: CaPstone Showcase
Please help us make our students’ Virtual Capstone Showcase a special occasion by visiting the sites of their projects, and leaving a comment. Our students have worked hard to meet the demands of a senior capstone project, in difficult circumstances, and they are facing a challenging job market (although Computer Science is doing relatively well even in the COVID19 economy). It will encourage them to have your feedback, as industry leaders.
A welcome from the chair of the board, Chris Meissner (Meissner Filtration), who asked that everyone write their names on the Zoom chat, as the meeting was brief (half an hour). We are all meeting online due to the COVID19 circumstances.
Virtual Instruction – in mid March the campus did an emergency move to finish the term through virtual instruction; some classes fit very well on line, but many, especially those that require hands on labs are more difficult to deliver virtually. Most students are coping very well, some – surprisingly few – have disengaged as a result.
This summer we need to redo the fall 2020 course planning, in a more deliberate way, to be virtual, now that we have more time to plan. It is important work but unfortunate because we need to spend summers doing research and projects – faculty are on a 9 month contract so summer is critical to stay current in our field. We are lobbying for stipends for all our instructors to be able to work in the summer on virtual delivery.
Silver lining: virtual instruction has been creeping up on everyone, and some students, especially those working (they are becoming a bigger segment of the student population) who come back to school to acquire new skills, prefer online. As instructors we prefer face-to-face in most cases. But the current emergency gave us an opportunity to prepare an online curriculum, which we might deploy in other emergencies, and more positively in a degree completion program that we are exploring.
ABET Update: Our application for ABET Accreditation is on schedule. Prof Brian Thoms is on sabbatical (he has just been selected our new graduate director), and Reza Abdolee has been kind enough to continually remind everyone of the need to submit teaching assessments.
Further Items:
Eric Kaltman: building an intranet for departmental communication, and revamping our Games offering; it is great to finally have a faculty expert in game development, a topic that brings many students into Computer Science.
Bahareh Abbasi taught Machine Learning, and worked on Human Robot Interaction, focusing on assistive robots, and is publishing in IEEE.
Vida Vakilian submitted NSF grant for Machine Learning for Wireless Networking Systems, developed new labs for Mechatronics.
Jason Isaacs, Vida Vakilian, Bahareh Abbasi are working hard to build Mechatronics Engineering, and they are preparing for the first junior cohort in 2020/21.
Jason Isaacs with EMEC sophomore students participated in the DARPA subterranean challenge, and finished #6 overall and 2nd among unfunded teams.
Jason Isaacs and Michael Soltys, working with Health Sciences (Sonsoles de Lacalle and Kristen Linton) and Eric Slack from Ventura Health, are helping Ventura Health with COVID19 Data Analytics (e.g., or our pandemic simulation: https://youtu.be/Y2a0OYIzgXc
Reza Abdolee established a “Cybersecurity and Wireless Lab”, and developed an ethical hacking course, as well as submitted NSF grants.
Scarlet Relle: is delivering our materials engineering class, and deploying our new furnace, tensile tester, hardness tester, microscope, grinder; all purchased with a gift from Bob and Susan Brown. Scarlet has used data from past labs to give students virtual lab assignments.
Scott Feister: was awarded time on supercomputers to design numerical simulations of scientific problems. He is applying for grants to do “big data” acquisition with custom-designed scientific hardware at scientific laboratories. Scott also incorporated AWS cloud computing, machine learning, and GPU computing into COMP 262: Computer Organization & Architecture.
Prof AJ Bieszczad has retired, we are grateful for his contribution over last 15 years to Computer Science at CI, and for staying on for another 5 years as a FERPing faculty and helping to deliver our undergraduate curriculum.
Houman Dallali has not come back from his 2019-20 leave of absence.
I would like to let you know about an opportunity on our campus – open to the public. From June 1 to July 20, I will be teaching online an advanced AWS Cloud Architecting class. It is of interest to any business considering to move IT operations (fully or partially) to the cloud.
This class is taught in partnership with AWS Academy, and students will have access to AWS resources, labs, materials and will be ready at the end to take the AWS Solutions Architect certification.
CSUCI, in response to the COVID 19 crisis, has generously offered 10 full scholarships for this class, and for everyone else lowered the cost to $1,100. Everyone is welcome to apply for the scholarships – the application is short and available at this link:
The global public cloud computing market has consistently grown 15% YoY and is projected to continue to do so through 2022 (Gartner)(https://toutcourt.msoltys.com/f319e6ce18)
We are offering an 8-week course in AWS Solutions Architect certification. The class will be taught by me (Michael Soltys), May 4 to June 26, 2020. In response to the need for online classes during this time of national emergency, we have halved the price of the course. Upon completion of this class, students will be able to take the AWS Solutions Architect certificate exam. This is an advanced level of AWS cloud expertise.
Please contact Jeff Ziskin (jeff.zisking@csuci.edu, 805-437-2653) with any questions. Please not, you do not have to be registered at the university as a student to register for this class.
From the abstract: This paper re-examines the content of a standard advanced course in Cybersecurity from the perspective of Cloud Computing. More precisely, we review the core concepts of Cybersecurity, as presented in a senior undergraduate or graduate class, in light of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
This paper has three goals: (i) to aid faculty in cloudifying a Cybersecurity offering; (ii) to re-examine Cybersecurity in light of the new paradigm of Cloud Computing; and, (iii) as a guide for preparing for the AWS Security Specialty certification. The paper presents an outline of Cybersecurity, with topics examined in the context of AWS, and with a long bibliography for a more in-depth study of each topic.
It should be mentioned that this paper is a second paper in a sequence on cloudification with AWS; the first one, Cloudifying the Curriculum with AWS, can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04020, and it was mentioned in this blog post. I mention the AWS security speciality certification exam in this post.
From the abstract: The Cloud has become a principal paradigm of computing in the last ten years, and Computer Science curricula must be updated to reflect that reality. This paper examines simple ways to accomplish curriculum cloudification using Amazon Web Services (AWS), for Computer Science and other disciplines such as Business, Communication and Mathematics.
In this paper we present the cloudification journey at our institution, California State University Channel Islands, where we have thriving programs under the department of Computer Science, that include Computer Science, Information Technology, Mechatronics Engineering, and a Masters program in Computer Science. We have partnered with AWS Academy and AWS Educate to bring cloud expertise to the students we serve – about 600 majors, in a campus of over 7,000 students. The paper gives the details.
Today, Friday January 24, 2020, we are hosting an AWS Educate workshop on the CSU Channel Islands campus, on Cloudifyig the Curriculum. The workshop will be held in Broome Library (easily recognizable as the only modern building on campus – here is its location on the campus map: http://maps.csuci.edu/?id=502#!m/189826).
Once you are in Broome library, please go to the second floor, to room number 2330. We will be starting at 9:30am, and finishing at 3:30. We will be catering both a continental breakfast and a lunch at around 12:30pm.
The registered guests can pick up their parking passes from Placer Hall (see map below). With the passes the guests can park in any lot “A”.
