Cloud Hosting

PR Newswire

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif, July 12, 2022

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif, July 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today synED, a national non-profit organization that identifies emerging best practices for effective articulation between employers, job seekers, and education providers, announced that Jared Amalong, Director of Computer Science and Digital Learning at the Sacramento County Office of Education, is this month's CyberHero.

With a wide breadth of experience in education, computer science, and educational technology, Mr. Amalong has a solid footing as he works to expand computer science education offerings to students and provide new classroom tools in Sacramento County and beyond. At the Sacramento County Office of Education (SCOE), he supports computer science educators from 24 school districts in 7 counties encompassing the Greater Sacramento Region.

Mr. Amalong served on the California Department of Education Computer Science Standards Advisory Council and is the K-12 Teaching and Learning Working Group Co-Lead for CSforCA. He also oversees the California Mayors Cyber Cup competition in the Capitol Region for SCOE.

"Jared is committed to creating equitable, accessible, relevant and engaging learning opportunities that allows students to further explore computer science, and the growth and success of programs that he supports is a testament to his hard work and dedication," said Lilibeth May Mora, a Professional Learning Manager at the Computer Science Teachers Association. "He has been such an amazing colleague to work with and an even better friend."

Mr. Amalong has been at the forefront of the technology changes happening in education, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic forced major changes in the ways students and teachers interact on a daily basis. The California Mayors Cyber Cup, for example, began in 2019 as an in-person student learning experience that brought students together regionally. Canceled in 2020, the competition has been strictly virtual in 2021 and 2022.

Story continues

"I would say that we've learned a lot about how we can create meaningful professional learning and student programs in a virtual environment," said Mr. Amalong. "Three years ago, the idea of using platforms like Zoom to connect students across the state wasn't one we considered. So we've learned a lot of good things, but it has definitely come with significant costs, chief among them exhaustion. The pandemic has been taxing for students and educators alike."

A top priority of his is to bring back an in-person component of the California Mayors Cyber Cup in 2023, while keeping the beneficial aspects of a virtual competition. For the past two competitions, planners have been able to include student teams from as far away as the College of the Redwoods, a community college that is a five-hour drive from Sacramento.

"What I hope for the next Mayors Cup in Spring 2023, is that we will benefit from the things we've learned and bring about a new experience in a hybrid way," Mr. Amalong continued.

Mr. Amalong was born and raised in the Sacramento area, and attended Sacramento State University before earning a Master's degree in Educational/Instructional Technology at Boise State University. Early in his career, he worked for the California Governor's information Technology Department. While there, Mr. Amalong altered his work schedule to allow him to coach high school football. He found that he loved working with students, and pursued a teaching credential.

In 2007, he began teaching Language Arts at his alma mater, Rocklin High School, and needed a tool to make his life easier grading essays. He discovered a new online tool called Writely a platform that had been acquired that year by Google and would soon become Google Docs. This accelerated his interest in education technology and helping both students and teachers use new technologies inside and outside the classroom.

He then joined Placer County's Office of Education, where he taught career and technical education courses and began working across the County as the Information and Communication Technologies Coordinator.

"My junior year in high school, there was a single computer programming course that was offered," he recalled. "There were so many students at my high school who were unable to access that course. That's been an inspriritation for me for a long time. How do we broaden access to these types of courses?"

He also focuses on increasing diversity in cybersecurity and computer science. One example is with the California Mayors Cyber Cup, where his goal is to achieve gender parity and increase diversity.

"I think we need to build something for students that are curious, and might be trying a computer science or cybersecurity competition for the first time, that's really what drives this work," Mr. Amalong added. He regrets that many cybersecurity competitions and recruitment efforts are based around themes of military, war, or battle, which can leave large swaths of students feeling left out.

Newer programs offered by SCOE include an e-sports competition, which will debut next year, and virtual courses in computer science that students from across the Sacramento region and beyond can take for high school and college credit.

"We really have enjoyed working with students from Sacramento to the Oregon border, and that's been made possible through generous grantors and the Sacramento County Office of Education Superintendent Dave Gordon," he concluded. "The work that we do with teachers, in professional learning, is actually statewide. We do have a significant focus on the Far North counties, working with our partners in Shasta and Siskiyou counties, for example."

About SynEDCyberHero's Series

SynED'sCyberHero'sseries is a monthly column published nationally that highlights individuals who quietly go above and beyond in helping to secure our nation and communities by developing cyber talent.SynED isa national non-profit that identifies and highlights emerging best practices for effective articulation between employers, job seekers, and education providers. SynED is the proud recipient of the 2021 Association for Career & Technical Education Business-Education PartnershipAward.

Contact:Liz Fraumann866-420-4573 x801340301@email4pr.com

Cision

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jared-amalong-selected-as-syneds-july-national-cyberhero-for-expanding-computer-science-education-and-new-education-technologies-in-northern-california-301584153.html

SOURCE SynED

See original here:

Jared Amalong Selected as SynED's July National CyberHero for Expanding Computer Science Education and New Education Technologies in Northern...

The research team is working to better secure the microstructure architecture of next-generation wireless systems and develop a new framework to transform it into a self-protecting entity.

Getty Images

Guofei Gu, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, is the lead principal investigator of a research team that has received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundations (NSF) Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation Systems (RINGS) program to enhance the security of future wireless and mobile network systems.

The RINGS program seeks to ensure the security and resiliency of next-generation (NextG) wireless and mobile communication, sensing, computing and networking systems that will support essential services.

NextG systems are expected to connect billions of Internet of Things devices and users, and provide personalized computational and storage resources for highly critical data in real time with little delay. In order to host so many application services, NextG will use edge computing, which refers to computing services that are physically located near the user or source of the data instead of miles away at the core of a traditional cloud data system. This way, the corresponding device can provide quick responses. For example, future autonomous vehicles may require NextG to support application services to perform computations, store and process critical data from their various sensors, manage vehicle-to-vehicle communications and run their deep-learning algorithms.

To ensure that the billions of NextG-supported services remain scalable and reliable, it will feature microservice architecture, which is composed of a single application or service divided into smaller, independent processes (microservices) that each has a specific purpose. They are reusable and can be made quickly to meet demand. In addition, if a single microservice fails, it will not cause the entire application or service to crash.

However, existing microstructure architecture is not typically developed and deployed with built-in security measures. While basic security patches are available on demand to add after the fact, they are not enough to support the large volumes of critical services that NextG hosts.

To address these issues, the team has proposed to develop a new framework, NextSec, to transform the microservices into self-protecting entities that can do security enhancement protection on their own using the concept of security transformation. In addition to security transformation, NextSec also provides new primitives for supporting a software-defined way of enforcing user-to-edge-to-cloud security and offers efficient, scalable verification of complex security properties across microservices.

NextSec is an ambitious attempt to build revolutionary capabilities for securing critical services in NextG, as well as generic edge and cloud computing, said Gu. This project will provide a solid foundation and collaborative community for future system and network security research.

The co-principal investigators on the project include associate professor Jeff Huang and assistant professor Chia-Che Tsai from the computer science and engineering department and Walter Magnussen, director of the Texas A&M Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center.

For the RINGS program, the NSF partners with the U.S. Department of Defenses Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and several industry partners such as Apple, Ericsson, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm and VMware.

More:

Researchers To Enhance Security Of Next-Generation Wireless Systems - Texas A&M University Today

McCOOK, Neb. A new mandate from the Nebraska Legislature requires computer science classes for public school students, but how students will be assessed on it has some local administrators scratching their heads.

LB 1112, the Computer Science and Technology Act, was approved by state senators in the 2022 session. It requires that by 2024-25, computer science be integrated into the curriculum for kindergarten through 12th grade and by 2026-27, a one-semester computer science/technology class be required for graduation. Annual status reports are to be submitted to the Nebraska Department of Education.

But what those status reports should contain is still a little fuzzy and for now, how to assess student technology skills is vague as well. Superintendent Grant Norgaard said Monday night at the McCook School Board meeting that due to the poor quality of the language contained in the bill, he expects that it may get re-written. Based on the language in the legislation, the NDE is having difficulty establishing standards for schools to follow, Norgaard said.

In addition, the new requirement will limit class selection for students. Norgaard told the Gazette that at McCook Public Schools, instead of hiring another teacher for a computer science class, teachers who teach a business apps class or an entrepreneurial class will instead teach a computer science class.

McCook High School previously had a computer science class but that was folded into a financial literacy class, another class mandated by the state legislature in 2021.

Tina Williams, McCook Public Schools technology director, said the goal of LB 1112 is to make sure students have enough skills to compete in the tech world in the 21st century. Williams presented a synopsis of what students are currently doing at each grade level related to computer science. This starts as early as first grade when students learn how to log into the school districts computers. This isnt as easy as it sounds, she said, as students are still learning the alphabet and how to keyboard.

This year, learning gaps in computer skills will be identified as a way to collect data for the required status reports and also to find out what areas can be improved, Williams said.

Computer skills are fine but more importantly, students need to have critical thinking skills, said board member Tom Bredvick. Williams said this is being addressed and gave the example of a teacher saying to a student, This window doesnt look right, what should you do?

Link:

Class offerings for students will be limited with new education mandate - McCook Daily Gazette

Bill Owiti

Bill Owiti has more than seven years of experience in technology and cloud-based solutions. Currently, Bill is technical projects and Salesforce lead at the Start Network, a group of more than 50 humanitarian agencies across five continents who work to transform humanitarian action through innovation, fast funding, early action, and locally led action. Bill was previously technology and Salesforce lead at the BOMA Project, a United States- and Kenya-based organization that focuses on eradicating extreme poverty in the African drylands. In addition, Bill has volunteered and set up cloud-based monitoring systems for other non-profit organizations, such as the Africa Yoga Project, Karura ACC, and the Kenya Drylands Education Fund. Bill holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and many other certifications, including ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), Prince II, and Salesforce. Through his company, Cobitech Solutions, Bill is committed to digitizing non-profits through consultancy, voluntary, and pro bono arrangements. After completing the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders, Bill plans to expand his digitization of non-profits by using technology that will improve their visibility, impact, and program monitoring efforts.

Read more from the original source:

Meet the Mandela Washington Fellows | Northern Nevada International Center - Nevada Today

(From left) Dom, Phil, and Alex Miceli on the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii.

Phil, Alex, and Dom Miceli have a lot in common, especially their choice in college education the three brothers are all aerospace engineering students at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The trio are pursuing a challenging, in-demand career field that also honors the legacy of their father.

We were all good at math in high school, and it was always going to be some kind of engineering for me, but this especially would make him proud, Alex said.

Alex, 21, is a rising senior. Phil, 23, is wrapping up his masters in the aerospace BachelorsAccelerated Masters program, and Dom, 19, is a rising sophomore.

Their father Sal passed away in 2017. He began his career at Lockheed Martin after earning a degree in aerospace from CU Boulder, where he met their mother Kris, who was also an aerospace student and would go on to work at NASA.

They met in a summer electronics class, Phil said. He went over and asked if she needed help setting up her oscilloscope.

As the brothers grew up, both of their parents eventually moved out of aerospace. Their father opened a successful financial planning firm and their mother switched to software development, but aerospace always held a special significance in their lives.

There are so many cool projects that have been going on the last 10 years in aerospace, and Ive just always been interested, Dom said.

For Phil, aerospace offers a unique opportunity to bring together an array of disciplines.

I like computer science, but am pretty good at physics and didnt want that to go to waste, Phil said. I needed to do some sort of engineering too, and aerospace lets you apply physics, science, and math, and its cool.

While some siblings might not enjoy having their brothers pursue the same major at the same university and at the same time, no less the Micelis share an earnest camaraderie.

When Dom was applying to schools I was 100% you should come to CU Boulder. There was no resentment, Alex said. Phil and I also lived together for the 2020-21 year.

Having a brother a few years ahead of you in the same program does help with studying.

I was bugging Phil all through sophomore year with questions, Alex said. Dom also just finished Calc 3. Phil and I told him it was a tough class. We understand the trials and tribulations of the program.

It does lead to the occasional double take from classmates and friends, like when Alex invited Dom to join his fraternity.

People were surprised. Both of you in aerospace?! Actually, theres one more. Weve got an older brother too, Alex said.

Phil will complete his masters degree in August. He has a job lined up as a guidance, navigation, and controls engineer at Lockheed Martin, where he has interned for the last four years. Alex, meanwhile, is in his third summer interning at Northrup Grumman.

Dom is still undecided on a career path, but he has three years of his degree to complete, so there is plenty of time. This summer, he has a software internship at a firm in Denver.

As the three brothers grow in aerospace as young professionals, their mother is on the sidelines, cheering them on.

Our mom is very, very proud of us, Dom said, with a hint of embarrassment. Whenever were out and about she loves to gush to people about how all her kids are engineers.

Continued here:

All in the family three brothers majoring in aerospace at CU Boulder - University of Colorado Boulder