Category: Student Projects

TO: Professor Ellis

FROM: Joshua Patterson

DATE: 9/27/2020

SUBJECT: 500-word summary

My 500-word summary is about the article titled “Emotional Training and Modification of Disruptive Behaviors through Computer-Game-Based Music Therapy in Secondary Education.” This article’s abstract tells us about how music is important to a person’s development and behavior, and also how researchers in 1999 have used music therapy to come up with a solution to help students with their disruptive behavior by using video game music from the game Musichao. They believe that music has the ability to not only to help a person with their behavior, but can also affect other characteristics such as creativity, motivation and another resource for those visual or auditory learners as well, and also defines the term “Music Therapy” and explains the effects it can have on different parts of children’s and adolescents’ life. The author continues to explain the five stages of adolescence, adolescents being exposed to games to examine the effects that it has on their intelligence, education and daily life.

The author explains the process of how they conduct the tests and what their role is as the examiners. They give us a brief overview of six participants within a fixed age range to examine how they act within a classroom setting, and explains how two groups of instruments were used for this test that already had existed. The author talks about the two instruments, which were, a book that was used as the first instrument and extensive tests in the book that are going to be ran to examine the characteristics of each adolescence participant, and the game that was used as the second instrument, how the game works, and the daily results it provides the examiners. The author then explains the procedure of how the tests are ran on each participant and who will be assigned to deliver each test. Then, details of the process of examining the test results given from the tests based on the results from the first test in the beginning to the last test at the end.

The researchers provide the actual results of the tests, the design of the tests, and the comparison of the tests from the beginning to last test. The author explains each of the tests, the scoring system used to keep track of each participants’ progress throughout for each of the tests, what each score means for each participant, and their results on each test. They also gives us an overview of the meaning of the results from the first test to the last, the results showing improvement in the participants that were chosen for this study and the minor changes are making their hypothesis somewhat true but not enough that it can be said for certain that music does in fact help with all aspects of their intelligence. 

Lastly, the author explains how their tests can be taken as proof that music therapy works, but that their study wasn’t perfect because of lack of particular cases that could not be used, such as having a control group for this study and not having randomization in the study as well.

Bibliography

• Chao-Fernández, R., Gisbert-Caudeli, V., & Vázquez-Sánchez, R. (2020). Emotional Training and Modification of Disruptive Behaviors through Computer-Game-Based Music Therapy in Secondary Education. Applied Sciences (2076-3417), 10(5), 1796. https://doi-org.citytech.ezproxy.cuny.edu/10.3390/app10051796

TO: Professor Jason Ellis

FROM: Ye Lin Htut

DATE: Sept 13, 2020

SUBJECT: 500-Word Summary

This memo is a 500-word summary of the article, “Drawn to distraction: A qualitative study of off-task use of educational technology” by Jesper Aagaard, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.

              This article discusses about the present student experience of off-task use of educational technology and knowledgeable measuring study of students off-task use of technology during class. This experimental investigation is informed by Jesper philosophy, which varies from traditional reasoning theory by changing emphasis from mental processes to physical use of technologies.

              The current study on educational technology primarily depends on a rational knowledge of awareness. As any other idea, this implies some of the studies of existence, justification, genetic beliefs, and emotional. The idea is the present school of philosophy that is remaining progressively used in the study of human technology interactions. This means a change beyond traditional structures of experience and consciousness structures of experience and awareness and the concept requires two changes one in inner balance and characterization. Even though an expanded understanding to characterized use of technologies, a philosophy focused on academics infrequently performs practical researches of people’s technologically mediated practices and habits.

              One part of a broader analysis of educational technologies arbitration of student attention in an educational perspective. Students with age between 16-20 years some college and its institutes services a technological policy of letting students bring their owned devices to school. The result of student use technology is common. Digital technologies have largely superseded notebooks, calculators, and pencils. Students sometimes do not even carry books to school because they can rely only on their laptops. Students frequently called the impulse to connect in off-task interest as a attraction towards and frequently visited unrelated educationally websites such as social media, which is generally used among all students. Students are fall into distraction. If the class section are considered to be too hard, students fall behind and result to distraction. They become emotionally exhausted and disconnect from class and go to unrelated websites.

              Teachers are highly concerned of the tasks presented by off-task use of educational technology. Jesper informs us, “One teacher poignantly explained that when students look at their laptops and smile during English grammar, he knows that it “probably doesn’t have anything to do with the lesson” (Jesper Aagaard, 2015, p. 94). Teachers and school educators are facing enormous task to today modern educational system. They are worry to a student will not learn anything, get a low grade from their class, and become a bad reputation on an educator or school. The endless availability of fascinating options to a continuing lesson. Educators concur of this is a never ending challenge however consider this situation differently.

              Ever more digitalization educational system recognizing why students often use educational technologies for off-task activity is critical. In this article presented the idea of an attraction towards often visited educationally nonrelated websites. Students respond clearly to the apparent boredom of lecturing. They describe lessons as boring which is why they give into desire and become confused.

              As a measuring examination about off-task use of educational technology in real classrooms are an increase in environmental related to new systems. How will educators handle with off-task use of educational technology? Should digital devices be banned from the classroom or are a device to be controlled by the school or teacher administrators? This is not impossible but also highly beneficial if the device are the only access to class-related.

References

Aagaard, J. (2015). Drawn to distraction: A qualitative study of off-task use of educational technology. Computers & Education, 87, 90–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.03.010

To: Prof. Ellis

From: Shital B K

Date: 09/23/2020

Subject: 500-Word Summary

This memo is a 500-word summary of the article, “Modern Web-Development using ReactJS,” by Sanchit Aggarwal (Northern India Engineering College). The article explains about the modern web-development techniques using ReactJS framework.

ReactJS is a JavaScript library used to design and develop the user interfaces that simplifies the data rendering and binding of large web-based applications. According to the writer, “React basically enables development of large and complex web-based applications which can change its data without subsequent page refreshes.” (Aggarwal, 2018, p. 133). It is mostly used to design and develop modular user interfaces which simplifies the development of complex web-based applications. It follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture where it is used as the View. It also supports rendering on server-side application using NodeJS and the rendering process in the mobile devices are supported by React Native. ReactJS has simplified the data binding and rendering process and proven to be much easier for the front-end development.

Some of the features of ReactJS are Lightweight DOM for Better Performance, Easy Learning Curve, JSX, Performance, One-way data flow and Virtual DOM. ReactJS has the feature to interact with the document object model stored in the memory that doesn’t interact with the browser directly and hence provides excellent performance of the application. It is known as one of the easiest frameworks having less complexity to learn which makes it popular among the web developers. JSX is another language that simplifies React binding events. The reason that the framework is highly efficient in performance because it has the feature called virtual DOM.

The main working principle of React is based on MVC and DOM where MVC is popular for the user interface development and DOM represents the view of the applications. React performs all its task with the use of Component. The components are generally designed as tree structure that makes the code easy and reusable. The lifecycle of ReactJS framework is generally completed in three states. The first process is the mounting process and after the mounting process, the DOM is generated and finally the last process is the conversion of the DOM placement into the container node. The property set called as props and state are used to manipulate the Component. This property enables to create the user interface of the web application using Component.

React being an excellent framework has some limitations. Some of the limitations of React are having only the view entity in the MVC where additional tools should be used to implement other tasks. Inline templates and JSX are complex to use that can be tire some while designing large applications. The issue during the compilation is also one of the limitations using ReactJS compared to other frameworks.

Modern web development has become very dynamic and interactive. As a result, there are numbers of frameworks used in the industry. ReactJS is one of the most popular frameworks having lots of features that simplifies the data rendering and binding. Hence, it is widely used these days for web development and frontend development.

References

Aggarwal, S. (2018). Modern Web-Development using ReactJS. International Journal of Recent Research Aspects, 5(1), 133–137.

TO: Professor Ellis

FROM: Mamadou Bah

DATE: Sept 23, 2020

SUBJECT: 500-Word Summary Draft

This memo is a 500-Word summary of the article, “Comparative Analysis of Electrochemical Energy Storage Technologies for Smart Grid” by Reddy Salkuti.

The Various techniques used to store energy are the future for Renewable Energy and the Smart Grid system. Salkut argues, “storage techniques are the basis of the future of SG. Without adequate storage techniques, there will be no way to reliably meet the energy demands of the future” (Salkut, 2020, p. 2118). Those techniques play an important role in reducing the disadvantages Renewable energy faces today such as cost, popularity, production and sustainability. As the demand and supply of electricity vary all the times, Energy Storage is used to store energy when there is excess of production and use that energy when the demand is higher than the production. Renewable Energy can use super capacitors for a short-term storage and batteries for long term storage.

The types of battery technologies Salkuti writes about are the rechargeable that use chemical reactions to produce electricity. Energy storage technologies use rechargeable batteries following the process of reduction-oxidation for its charging and discharging process. They are classified into electrical, mechanical, electromechanical, and thermal. The different rechargeable Battery technologies described in this article are lithium-ion, sodium-sulfur, flow, lead acid and many other types of technologies that play a fundamental role in the Renewable energy sector and in the Smart Grid system.

The first battery technology Salkuti writes about in this article is the Lithium-ion battery. Made of graphite and lithium metal amalgams, Lithium-ion battery has high performance, but it has its disadvantages such as cost and sensitivity to high temperatures. It can be found in cars, phones and many other devices. The second is the Lithium iron phosphate. It is safe, and waste free. The third one is the Lithium-air batteries, found in electronics, electric car and Grid System, has high specific energy that can be compared to liquid fuels. The fourth one is the Sodium based battery which operates in room temperature. It has negative potential and specific capacity. The fifth one is Sodium-sulfur batteries that operates at 300 degrees Celsius with efficient charging process and can be found in vehicles and stationary applications. The sixth one is Sodium nickel chloride battery also called ZEBRA. It has a low internal resistance and high specific energy which makes it expensive, and it operates at high temperatures. Seventh one are Flow batteries that are built with two separates sides that is composed with chemical energy and it is very reliable. The following technology is Vanadium redox flow battery. It is a combination of ion metals, and it is unpopular. Next are Zinc-bromine batteries that use zinc metal for their anode plates and bromine for the cathode plates, and the energy is stored by the zinc metal. The last three technologies Salkuti lists are the Nickel-based batteries, Lead acids, and the Metal air. They are used in electronics and telecommunication, and they have good performances. 

Reference

Salkuti, S. R. (2020). Comparative analysis of electrochemical energy storage technologies for smart grid. Telkomnika, 18(4), 2118–2124. https://doi.org /10.12928/TELKOMNIKA.v18i4.14039

TO: Professor Ellis
FROM: Albert Chan
DATE: Sept. 22, 2020
SUBJECT: 500-Word Summary

The purpose of this 500-Word Summary is to condense the contents of “A First Look at Zoombombing”, by Ling C., Balci U. et al., with the purpose of the article analyzing why and how zoombombing (henceforth known as zbing) occurs, then suggesting a simple solution to the issue of zbing.

It starts out by identifying various virtual conferencing tools before mentioning the recent series of attacks of zbing. Then, there is a discussion of best practices to prevent zbing but not enough insider information on how the attacks are done (e.g. whether it is via brute force, insider, etc). There is also a cursory introduction to a later analysis on 2 social media platforms (Twitter, 4chan) and research on how to identify which postings of meeting credentials are “asking” attackers to zoombomb(henceforth known as zb) a meeting room. Research shows that most (above 50%) postings on both social media platforms are indeed “asking” attackers to zb their meeting room. Something to note is that nothing in the article is censored because everything is available online.

According to the Ling C., Balci U. et al, zbing is “composed of four phases…empirical evidence reported by previous research that studied coordinated online aggression, trolling, and harassment on other social media platforms”(p. 2). The four steps of the threat model are as follows: Call for attack, Coordination, Delivery, Harm. It is quite self-explanatory.

Later on, there is an identification of the top 10 most used online conferencing tools. There is a chart of data on these tools (e.g. free or not, how much to upgrade, year of release). Zoom was established in 2011, but has risen to prominence and gained infamy during the pandemic, thus coining the term zbing. Eight of the ten popular online meeting services are free to use. All services have a “you know meeting ID, you know the way in.” Less than half of the services provide security.

Twitter and 4chan are selected as social media platforms to analyze data(e.g. creating an API to collect posts [Twitter]), live threads with meeting ID on Zoom (4chan) or posts with meeting ID (Twitter). 

An introduction on how researchers separated zbing posts from non-zbing posts by organizing a codebook. Most likely still some false positives and false negatives in the end. On 4chan, Zoom and Google Meet have ~50% accuracy of zbing; ~50% of the posted links and messages are people asking to be zb-ed. On Twitter, much less % of people ask for attackers. It should be noted that the majority if not all Google Hangouts and Skype links are posted with good intentions. Identification of each post asking to be attacked, time, insider/not insider, others via codebook. Identification as well as separation of terms, themes, identity, contact. 

The solution to zbing is creating unique meeting links for each participant.

References

Ling, C., Balci, U., Blackburn, J., Stringhini, G. (2020). A First Look at Zoombombing. Computers and Society, 1(1), 1-14. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.03822.pdf 

TO: Professor Jason Ellis

FROM: Gladielle Z. Cifuentes

DATE: September 9, 2020

SUBJECT: 500-word summary

This is a 500-word summary of the article “Security Flaws in 802.11 Data Link Protocols” by Nancy Cam-Winget (Cisco Systems), Russ Housley (Vigil Security), David A. Wagner (University of CA at Berkeley) and Jesse Walker (Intel Corp.).It discusses the vulnerabilities that a WLAN experiences by a person who can potentially eavesdrop through radio receivers due to weak security protocols.

Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is the mechanism that the IEEE 802.11 protocol uses as its standard for data confidentiality. WEP had an array of flaws and would leave Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) with security vulnerabilities. This article will describe the flaws of WEP and how researchers went about on finding ways to improve the security or replace WEP. 

WEP has many vulnerabilities and reasons as to why it is not a trustworthy security protocol. Since using WEP is optional, it causes a huge threat to security. This results in encryption of data to never be used. Another defect of WEP is the shared key standard it uses for all devices. According to this article, the most serious security breach that WEP has is how attackers can use cryptanalysis to recover the encryption keys that the WEP uses on its devices. “Once the WEP key is discovered, all security is lost.” (Cam-Winget, Housley, Wagner & Walker, 2003, p. 36). Due to the flaws of WEP, the conclusion is that this security protocol was poorly designed. Experienced security protocol designers and cryptographers are needed for the creation of such difficult security protocol designs. 

A short-term solution to WEP is the creation of Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). TKIP are sets of algorithms that “adapt the WEP protocol to address the known flaws while meeting these constraints” (Cam-Winget, Housley, Wagner & Walker, 2003, p. 37). Packet sequencing and Per-Packet key mixing are the functions that TKIP help with the security flaws of WEP for short term purposes. 

A long-term solution that researchers found for WEP security flaws is using the Counter-Mode-CBC-MAC Protocol. For the algorithm of this protocol, the Advanced Encryption system was used. This system contains features that improve the operation of the WEP and its security capabilities which include: single key usage, using integrity protection for packet header/packet payload, reducing latency by allowing precomputation, pipelining and more. In order to meet the criteria for this security protocol, the CCM mode was designed. 

CCM works by merging two techniques such as a counter mode for encryption and the Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code (CBC-MAC). CCM is seen as a vulnerability due to it using the same key for both “confidentiality and integrity” (Cam-Winget, Housley, Wagner & Walker, 2003, p. 39)., It guarantees to never overlap the counter mode with the CBC-MAC vector. 

This article reviewed WEP and the security flaws found. The authors described short-term and long-term alternative protocols that can replace WEP and how they can be implemented for securing a WLAN. 

References:

Cam-Winget, N., Housley, R., Wagner, D., & Walker, J. (2003). Security Flaws in 802.11 Data Link Protocols. Communications of the ACM, 46(5), 35-39. https://doi.org/10.1145/769800.769823 

TO: Professor Ellis

FROM: Teodor Barbu

DATE: September 23, 2020

SUBJECT: 500-Word Summary

This memo is a 500-word summary of the article, “The Role of Openness in Open Collaboration: A Focus on Open‐Source Software Development Projects,” by Saerom Lee, Hyunmi Baek, and Sehwan Oh, professors at the University in Deagu and Seoul, Republic of Korea.

Easy access to information facilitated groups of people working on open projects over the internet and innovative companies learned how to exploit this as an important tool. GitHub and SourceForge are two platforms where people can open projects and developers work together to achieve a common goal. Open-source software development (OSSD) became an alternative to getting knowledge from the outside of the organization in a way to benefit both the organizations and developers. In this article the authors conduct an experiment to determine how exploration and exploitation, concepts of organizational learning, impact the development of a project. To effectively tackle the problems of OSSD, developers were separated in categories that either explore the internal resources or exploit the outside knowledge. For this research data was gathered from 17,691 repositories from GitHub. A team of developers, called an organization, can work on one or more projects, and can collaborate with other organizations to complete a project. GitHub encourages collaboration from the outside of an organization as a way of bringing new ideas and solutions and they consider it vital for the survival of an organization. The conductors of his experiment try to establish whichever exploration or exploitation is better for the overall progress of projects. In gathering and analyzing the data was used a web crawler powered by Python focused on GitHub projects bigger than 300 days and with at least five people. The number of commits was considered relevant for developers’ performance.

The results of the experiment show that successful repositories have more external developers but also a dedicated internal team that uses efficiently inside resources in their external interactions. In the cases followed with release software they also notice an increased external collaboration. As the researchers conclude, “we determined that the impact of exploration increases with an increase in exploitation, that is, ambidextrous research has a positive impact on the project performance of an open collaboration over the Internet.” (Lee, Baek, & Oh, 2020, p. 202). Three models reveal that a repository is successful if the number of external collaborations is higher and the performance drops if the number of internal members is higher. As Model 4 monitors software release cases, they found that performance is affected after the release just because all the development is switched to maintenance done by the internal team and external interaction is not mandatory anymore. This experiment demonstrates the importance of free unlimited interaction in OSSD. Exchange of ideas with collaborators outside the team proved to be beneficial for the success of the projects and for the future consistency of the teams.

References

TO: Professor Ellis 

FROM: Lia Barbu

DATE: September 23, 2020

SUBJECT: 500-Word Summary

This memo is a 500-word summary of the article, “Cyber Security in the Quantum Era,” by Petros Alden and Elham Kashefi, both professors in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburg. 

Cybersecurity is essential to protect our systems, and it should be ready for a new computational model as quantum technologies. Quantum theory was by far one of the significant technological developments of the 20th century. A breakthrough will be possible soon due to the research in the field. Quantum computers will be the most valuable quantum technology due to their computational power. Quantum technologies’ achievements already exist Google’s processor “Bristlecone” and satellite quantum communication.

Quantum computers are no longer a myth, and cybersecurity must prepare for this new era. Alden and Kashefi inform us, “Quantum technologies may have a negative effect to cybersecurity, when viewed as a resource for adversaries, but can also have a positive effect, when honest parties use these technologies to their advantage.” (Alden & Kashefi, 2019, p. 121). There are three scenarios: one everything is secure, and the other two explore what new challenges quantum technologies can create. In the first scenario, the honest party has classic technologies, and the adversary has a large quantum computer. In the second scenario, the honest party has limited access to quantum technologies, and the adversary can use any quantum technologies. The third scenario looks in the future: quantum computation devices and the parts implicated in the process would protect their data and be secure. The focus will be on quantum technology’s effects on cryptographic attacks and attacks on the new quantum hardware. 

Even though quantum attacks seem far away; there are three essential rationales why we must address it now: security can hit retroactively, to create secure cryptographic solutions, and to be ready to implement the new technology. Cybersecurity research in post-quantum cryptography is divided into three classes considering adversary use of quantum technology: classic technology with access to an oracle/quantum computer, modification of security definition, and changes required to the new protocol. There are cryptosystems considered secure to a quantum computer attack, and the article considers three issues: confidence, usability, and efficiency. Next is explained what can happen when the adversary can make changes to security notions and what steps should be taken to prevent and stop this action. Quantum rewinding is a technique that adds a mechanism that enforces malicious adversaries to behave as a weak one.

As quantum technologies develop, quantumly protocols should become a reality. Practicality includes research that includes quantum technologies presently achievable. Quantum gadgets open a door for new attacks like side-channels attacks. The security for this is the device-independence that comes with high resources cost. Standardization and protocols should be created for quantum technology. Quantum technology will become a significant part of the computing and communication environment. 

Reference

WALLDEN, P., & KASHEFI, E. (2019). Cyber security in the quantum era. Communications of the ACM, 62(4), 120–129. https://doi.org/10.1145/3241037

TO: Professor Ellis

FROM: Enmanuel Arias

DATE: September 16, 2020

SUBJECT: 500-Word Summary

This memo is a 500-word summary of the article, “Explore Modern Responsive Web Design Techniques” by Elena Parvanova, a member of the National Organizing Committee for the IEEE International Conference on Information Technologies.

29 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee created the first website that consisted of left-aligned text with blue hyperlinks on a white background. The first websites were created and managed by the IT departments of large companies. Nowadays, anyone with basic computer skills can create a website.  With the web design industry continually growing, it is important for companies to have well designed websites, as it can play a role in their success.

Web design began in 1993 with the introduction of images accompanied with text. In 1994, The World Wide Web Consortium was formed and established Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) as the standard for web design. HTML has its limitations, but the use of JavaScript resolves them. The following year, Flash and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were introduced. Flash became a popular tool to create more elaborate websites, but it was not search-friendly. Eventually, the combination of JavaScript and jQuery replaced the use of Flash. CSS provides a structure for designing multiple webpages. It allows websites to be created with a tableless design using percentages, known as fluid design.

With the increase of mobile devices with internet access, the layout of websites needed to adapt to the variety of screen sizes, while also keeping the design consistent across all devices. In 2007, column grid systems began to see widespread use by web designers. The most used system was the 960-grid system, with 12-column division. The system lays the content out on a 960px-wide browser window. Eventually, the fixed-width grid was replaced with percentages to align with fluid design.

Web designers had separate layouts for computers and mobile devices. Elena states that Ethan Marcotte is responsible for the birth of Responsive Web Design (RWD), who in 2010, “proposed that the same content could be used, but in different layouts and designed depending on screen size” (Parvanova, 2018, p. 3). RWD uses the viewport meta tag, grid system, and media queries to determine which layout to use when displaying content. RWD also led to the creation of responsive frameworks like Bootstrap. These frameworks standardized commonly used elements and introduced layout models like the CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid Layout.

Modern web design focuses on the organization of elements, positioning of blocks and the order of content. Flexboxes are optimized for interface design and the positioning of elements. The parent element will contain the child elements and “flex” accordingly to either fill unused space or shrink to prevent overflowing. Flexboxes were popularized because it allowed web designers to finally align elements properly. Unlike the grid layout, flexboxes are not intended to design the layout of an entire webpage. Since the grid layout is not as supported as flexboxes, a combination of the two is frequently used in RWD.

Reference

Parvanova, E. (2018). Explore Modern Responsive Web Design Techniques. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Technologies, 43–48. Retrieved from http://infotech-bg.com/