Join us to celebrate the official opening of our refurbished Ethical Hacking Lab (AS236) on Friday the 28th of October.  The fun kicks off at 2pm.  There will be snacks and refreshments.  Come along and see what we have done with it.

We have completely refitted AS236 with high specification PCs and some significant investment in Infrastructure from the University, including sizeable donation of equipment from Nettitude (http://www.nettitude.com/).  Nettitude have been instrumental in getting the lab to its current state as they donated a Server, Firewall and IDS module, which would cost in the region of 14k - 17k to purchase.  This paved the way for the University to invest a further 20k, which has seen 25 new PCs, a rack and additional server be purchased, commissioned and configured for use in AS236.

All of this has only been possible through the continued support and hard work of some dedicated colleagues,  in particular Alastair Railton for helping commission &  transit some networking infrastructure devices for AS236.   There have been some equally hard working students (David Molik, Antal Goldshmidt & Tim Nursall) for their part in helping either configure or setup and maintain the new devices.  Special thanks to David Molik as he has been working particularly hard to help and this has not gone unnoticed.  I’d also like to thank the ITS team and particularly for their patience when I was ordering the rack and server.  Jon Arnold and his colleagues do not miss out as I know they helped me out by getting the rack into AS236 - thank you.

Hope  to see some of you on the 28th.

Nettitude are an organisation based in Leamington Spa.  They offer many IT Security and security related services such as penetration testing, PCI/DSS compliance, unified communications (VoIP, Fixed Line, Email etc.) and Infrastructure, such as virtualised platforms and services.  They have a CREST registered penetration testing team and some very well known and respected clients.  Nettitude believe that their personnel are their most important asset and have a strong belief in training and mentoring their growing workforce.  The ethos of Nettitude is excellence as standard and the certainly apply this belief, with all staff having the opportunity to take multiple vendor qualifications.

Over the last two years the computing department have been working with Nettitude on student placements and placing our graduates into full-time employment as penetration testers and security architects.  Not only do our graduates and alumni benefit from Nettitude’s philanthropic activities, but they now extend to our undergraduate and postgraduate students.  Nettitude have delivered some very interesting and informative talks by Ben Densham on PCI/DSS (Payment Card Industry/Data Security Standard) and planned sessions from Alison Hodges on CV construction. Most recently donated around 15k worth of top end server, firewall and IDPS (Intrustion Detection and Prevention System) module for use in the ethical hacking laboratory.  This is a welcome addition to our growing hacking and forensics capabilities and can also be moved to the new building next September when we gain official entry.

It is therefore with gratitude and sincere best wishes that Coventry University wish to thank Nettitude for their continuing support in ethical hacking and their continued employment of our graduates and the placement opportunities.  We are very much in your debt and look forward to maintaining and growing our relationship.

For many years second year computing students have staged a Trade Fair to promote the projects they have been working on all year.  This year’s project asked students to develop an app for a phone or mobile device.  Most groups developed their app to run on an Android phone.  The apps developed were very diverse, providing facilities such as Security Alerts, Child Trackers, Employee Tracking and Support and, for students, rather predictably, a Pub Crawl Planner.  Another app is being considered for adoption by the University.

As well as providing some fun, the projects allowed students to work on a task, in teams, developing their professional and project management skills, alongside enhancing their technical abilities.   The project provides a significant challenge for the students but also the Trade Fair provides an assessment of a very different nature to anything else we ask students to do.  The 24 stands attracted a phenomenal 1300 visitors: a mix of staff and students.   Chris Bland (Head of Department) commented that “This was probably the most impressive Trade Fair yet.”

There are more photographs on Facebook, in the ‘Computing @ Coventry University’ group.

Graduates starting out in any industry might find it difficult to get a job in the current economic climate, but for the graduates of information security, securing employment is especially difficult without relevant work experience.  With this in mind, leading IT security specialists and high standards employer, Nettitude Ltd (www.nettitude.com), have teamed-up with Coventry University to help companies fight cyber crime and create the ultimate career ready graduate.

In 2008, Nettitude first began to work with the Department of Computing & the Digital Environment at Coventry University. It was the University’s unique courses in BSC Ethical Hacking and Network Security and MSC Computer Forensics that captured managing director Rowland Johnson’s attention. “Coventry University offers some very strong Information Security courses, with a real application to many of the things that we do in our Compliance & Security Testing division. If we can help graduates to get their foot on that career ladder, along with much needed exposure to the security industry then we are keen to be involved.  All of our interns and graduates are closely supervised and mentored so that they can gain some real world experience without actually working on live client environments”.

At the moment Nettitude has one intern working within the business and is currently employing two former students from the Computing department.

Twenty-one-year-old intern student Tim Nursall said, “I was delighted to be accepted onto the Nettitude internship programme. I had heard good things about the company through the industry and the university, so I didn’t hesitate to apply for the post. In order to get the trust of any company you need to have industry work experience and I am grateful to Nettitude for investing in me”.

The growth of the Internet and networked computers has led to a revolution in information processing and electronic transacting. Unfortunately with this growth opportunities for electronic crime and computer misuse have arisen.  There is a growing need for specialists in this area to work in companies advising on security requirements or to work with law enforcement. An emerging field is ethical hacking where companies test the strength of their security defences by employing specialists to try to break into their systems.

Coventry University is one of only a handful of further education centres in the UK that offers courses of this kind, however that figure is on the rise thanks in part to the Internet and networking - but sadly with progress has come crime and abuse of the technology.

Senior lecturer Brian Moore from Coventry University said: “Our students are taught the ethics of preventing crime and how to be professional at what they do.  I am pleased to say our graduate recruitment figures are extremely positive; however graduates looking to enter into the industry can sometimes be discouraged due to the lack of positions available to them if they have no trusted work experience.  It is thanks to companies like Nettitude, who take on students preparing them for the real world and help to ignite their careers by putting their studies into practice.”

We achieved some success at the IET University Challenge even held on Wednesday the 28th of April.   We entered 5 posters along with other entries accepted from Birmingham, Aston and Warwick universities.   In total there were approximately 20 posters entered.  Andy Abgottspon, who is in his final year on a BSc in Informatics, was awarded a prize and £50 for the poster on his final year project entitled ‘A hand gesture interface for investigating human computer interaction’. This is a project being supervised by Chris Peters.      Many thanks to Bob Jinks for organising and encouraging our entries. The photo above shows Adam by his poster. Congratulations to all those who entered, the standard was very high - if you did not win a prize this time, you can always keep trying…

Students on computing courses have recently staged their annual Trade Fair.  As well as providing some fun and a real challenge, this event is an assessment of a different nature to all their others. Students have an opportunity to present the project they have been working on all year.  Seventeen groups put on displays and demonstrations and the busy event had almost 800 visits from a mix of staff and students.

This year’s project topic was to design and develop a system which could allow staff or students to book rooms and other working spaces within the new Engineering and Computing building.  Students came up with many creative ideas and showed they really understand the complexities involved in such a system.  Ian Dunn, Acting Dean commented that their ideas were ‘impressive’.

Left to Right: Hamad Abdallah, Musaad Alharbi and Andrei-Valentin Mocanu

The team who won the ‘Best Stand’ prize: Left to Right: Lee Burbury, Emanuel Stanciu, Chris Bland (Head of Department), Mohammed Usman, Chris Morton and Mubashir Nawaz.

There are more photographs on Facebook, in the ‘Computing @ Coventry University’ group.

March 11^th saw the launch of the 2010 CDE seminar series.  We were delighted to receive a most interesting talk from Dr Peter Lane of Hertfordshire university on “Computational Models of Perceptual Learning Through Chunking” .  Peter explored the question of whether computer algorithms can match the ability of humans to directly perceive meaning in complex data using the exemplar of chess playing.  

Peter, who is a bit of a mean chess player himself having competed at national and international tournaments, was invited by  Dr Norlaily Yaacob who chaired the event.  Norlaily and Peter are former class mates having completed their doctoral studies  in the same department at the same time at Exeter University. 

Look out for further events in the 2010 CDE seminar series.  All students and staff are welcome!

Last week, module 395CT Enterprise Systems Development had the pleasure of receiving a guest lecture from Hiten Karia of Barclaycard.  Hiten was especially welcome because,  as well as providing an excellent lecture on data warehousing at Barclaycard, he is a recent alumnus of Coventry University having graduated in 2006.  His story is especially interesting as he has two brothers who also graduated him from Coventry University in Computer Science. All three won first class honours ! Thus Hiten has a special affection for Coventry University and he talked about how his degree has helped him in his career so far.  

He is currently managing Prospect II, a 30 terabyte data warehouse system that contains a multitude of data about 40 million adults in the UK and which is used for marketing. We were enthralled by his account of how Barclaycard see the future of online payments and how business intelligence for marketing is being informed by data mining from a multitude of data sources,  from electoral role, through bank accounts, through utility accounts even to our Facebook comments  ! – a bit big brother  we agree - but  rest assured -  all subject to data protection law!  Hiten mentioned how material he had learned in HCI, AI and databases while on our course had helped him in his current position.  Had he known when he was a student what he was to do when he graduated he would also have opted for modules in SAS and data mining. 

We know that most students do not know for sure in which branch of computing they will eventually specialise as a career so the important thing is to get a good grounding in the foundations of Computer Science from which to launch into any direction later. Hiten now interviews students for their first graduate positions at Barclaycard. Barclaycard looks for graduates strong in the following areas “working together”, “loving success”, “taking ownership” and “thinking ahead”.  I guess these desirable attributes would be appreciated by many companies so when you go for your interviews, think about what you have done on your course that provides evidence of such and make a good case.  Hiten says, “When I interview students I look for good attitude and good aptitude. If you have these it’s likely that you’ll be in!”

We all enjoyed Hiten’s presentation and are proud of his success. We hope he enjoyed being on “the other side of the lectern” - a change since the last time he was at the University!

The DSM (Distributed Systems and Modelling Research Group) welcome two new researchers to their team  this term: Adriana Matei and Jin Tong.

Adriana, who is from Romania has a BSc in Informatics from West University, Timisoara, will be working under the direction of Danny Chao on the EU funded DEHEMS (Digital Environment Home Energy Management System ) project.  The government has unveiled plans for every home in Britain to be equipped with smart meters by the end of 2020.   That gives us a lot of scope for the development for innovative software to create new applications based on the information generated by these soon –to-become ubiquitous devices.  Adriana loves Engineering challenges and is looking forward to tackling the task of making it easy for us to lower our energy consumption with the help of innovative software.  When not working on her research Adriana loves skiing, music and sports.  Adriana says “Life is a continuous challenge and all the best things come when you are least expecting it.  New opportunities are just one step away and one should always be prepared for that“.

Jin, who has two MScs, one in Information and Library Management (Newcastle upon Tyne) and the other in Computing (Northumbria) as well as a BSc in Computer Science from Wuhan University, China, will be investigating how CSP can be used to represent knowledge. We hope that CSP will provide a powerful means of information representation and  fusion thus allowing for improved knowledge capture.   Jin’s Director of Studies is Dr Siraj Shaikh.  Jin already has some research experience from Cranfield University and is keen to develop a  her CSP based knowledge representation methodology.  Jin’s hobbies are travelling,  gardening , films, volleyball and card games.  Jin is currently on holiday in China and she wishes us all best wishes from there and is looking forward to starting with us.Both of the new researchers love languages.  As well as both  being fluent in English, Adriana is learning  Spanish and German, while Jin is leaning Greek.

If anyone would like further information about the DSM research group, please contact Prof. Danny Chao  (k.chao@coventry.ac.uk) or Prof Anne James a.jame@coventry.ac.uk

Anna Feng’s students’ from the 250CT module went to visit NMC (National Network Management Centre) on the 4th of February.

Once on site, several operation managers gave the students a very informative talk about how they monitor the National Network.  Students had guided tour of the facility, view the equipment and resources and also had the opportunity to ask questions about the role of the NNMC. 

The students really enjoyed this trip, so another thumbs up for Anna and the intestesting and varying activities taking place in 250CT.   If you would like to know more about what the NNMC do or for careers information, visit The National Network Monitoring Centre