Current teaching activities

CIS 864 - Advanced Topics in Network Security

SIG NewGrad - The goal of this weekly seminar is to orient new graduate students in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences to graduate study in the department. The focus will be on the transition from student to researcher, and on providing an overview of research currently being conducted by faculty and their students in the department. Topics include how to choose a research area, selecting advisors, identifying a thesis topic, setting research goals, the difference between an MS and PhD, networking skills, academic careers, industrial and government careers. Format will include presentations, shared experiences, group activities, and panel discussions.

CIS 450 - This is a basic networking course for undergraduates. Students develop a thorough understanding of foundation principles, architectures, and techniques employed in computer and communication networks. The class focuses on protocols and mechanisms used in the Internet TCP/IP protocol suite, including the design and operation of both wide-area and local-area networks. The course also involves implementation of sample protocols using application-level network programming.

CIS 864 - This course is heavily focused on research and emphasizes reading and writing of technical papers, and project work. Course 664 is not a prerequisite for 864, but it is definitely useful. The course covers a variety of topics in network security field, such as denial-of-service, worm and virus attacks, privacy, anonymization techniques, IP spoofing, social engineering, etc. The course explores each topic through a blend of short in-class overview followed by the discussion of the selected articles from techical conferences and journals that address important topic-related problems. A brainstorming session at the end of each class (in which everyone participates) helps understand the problem and the solution, and generate new ideas. Students will be required to (1) read all assigned papers and produce weekly reports criticizing them, (2) prepare a class presentation of one selected paper and (3) do a group project related to one of the topics covered and submit a report.

CIS 664 - This is an introductory course in network security. It provides detailed, in-depth overview of pressing network security problems and discusses potential solutions. The course covers a broad variety of important security topics, such as cryptography, authentication, denial-of-service attacks, worms, viruses, etc. This is both an informative and a practical course. Lecture and optional reading provide background information on the key network security concepts, and course projects create opportunity to exercise concepts learned in class. At the end of this course, the student should have sufficient knowledge of the field as to be able to start conducting independent research in specific sub-areas of interest in network security seminar courses. The course typically has 4 individual projects, and a final.

CIS 662 - This course provides a systematic study of core concepts of computer architecture design. These concepts have been developed in the last 50+ years, guided by extraordinary technology advancements, and the constant designer effort to get maximum performance out of desktop computers while minimizing the cost. The main focus is on key principles for high-performance low-cost desktop design. It covers in detail instruction set architectures, pipeline architecture, cache and virtual memories, methods for exploiting instruction level parallelism, multiprocessors and I/O devices. The workload is demanding and the course usually has 10 homeworks (one per week), a midterm and a final.