News

• 4/6/12 Chicago Tribune Article:  "The 6 Hottest Tech Careers of 2012". Read article here.
• MSIT graduate David Pessis ('09) Featured in Crain's Chicago Business. See more here or download the PDF.
• MSIT graduate Erik Neitzel ('05) Featured in Chicago Tribune Business Section. See more here or download the PDF.
• Berry and Honig Cross Disciplines to Squeeze Out Space on the Wireless Spectrum. See article
• Haddad served as an Int'l Advisory Chair for SIRCON 2011. See article
• Abraham Haddad Honored at the latest IFAC World Congress
  During the Opening Ceremony of the 18th IFAC World Congress in Milano, Italy on August 28, 2011, Prof. Haddad was honored by being appointed IFAC Advisor with the following citation: "For extraordinary lifetime contributions to automatic control science and technology and outstanding leadership in research and education".  There are only three other living IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Advisors in the USA.
• MSIT graduate David Carr ('00) named new NU-Q Chief Operations Officer.
  - David Carr was named chief operations officer for Northwestern in Qatar, announced by NU on Tuesday, July 12, 2011.
  - Carr, who was previously director of information technology and chief technology officer at NU-Q, will retain those titles, according to NU news release.
  - Previous to moving to Qatar in 2008, Carr worked at NU's Evanston campus as director of telecommunications and network services. He also taught two courses in the Kellogg School of Management.
  - Carr's new responsibilities as chief operations officer inclusde strategic planningand coordination of deaprtments and leading problem solving task forces and other efforts to support NU-Q Dean Everette Dennis' new initiatives for outreach and greater emphasis on digital and global media, according to NU news release.
  - "Davod Carr's wide experience and deep knowledge of virtually all of NU-Q's operations is greatly welcome as we continue to extend our activities and programs," Dennis said in a news release. "As we place more emphasis on planning and strategy to assure that NU-Q's academic and business operations are poised to help us achieve the vision and mission of this distinctive educational enterprise, David will be a vital member of our executive leadership team."
  - Carr is also an NU alum, having received his master's degree in information technology at the university's MSIT Program in 2000.
  * article courtesy of The Summer Northwestern, Thursday, July 14, 2011.
• Randall Berry and Michael Honig, along with Rakesh Vohra of Kellogg, co-organized a workshop on June 2-3 entitled "Spectrum Markets: Challenges Ahead". See article.
• Haddad Appointed Member of IFAC. See article
• Alok Choudhary Discusses Cyber Theft on Chicago Tonight. View video.
• Alok Choudhary on NPR/WBEZ Worldview. See article
• MSIT Professor Hooman Mohseni's students' discovery is IEEE cover story. See article
• MSIT Professor Yan Chen's research on social network security featured in Wall Street Journal.
  See article
  
• Air Force Print News article features MSIT Professor Yan Chen
  Yan Chen helped develop algorithms to deflect network attackers with AFOSR-Supported YIP Research. This article was also excerpted in ACM TechNews. Read more.
  
• MSIT Professor Alok Choudhary - Northwestern University Scalable Data Mining and Social Network Project in New York Times
  See article
• Haddad on 2011 Asian Control Conference committee
  Abe Haddad has been invited to serve on the Program Committee of the 2011 Asian Control Conference to be held in May, 2011, in Taiwan. More details.
• MSIT Program Facilitator wins STAR Award.
  MSIT Program Facilitator, George Nejmeh, was recently awarded the McCormick STAR Award for Spring Quarter. The McCormick STAR Leadership Award program provides a way to recognize individuals who demonstrate leadership and support of McCormick’s collaborative effort to achieve Excellence at All Levels. Congratulations to George on winning this award. See article.
• Alok Choudhary delivered the most recent of the Dean's Grand Challenge Lectures in Medicine and Engineering with a talk entitled "High Performance Data Mining: An Essential paradigm for Knowledge Discovery".  The lecture is available on video at this link, and also at the EECS Video Gallery.
• Obituary: Retired MSIT Professor Don Frey Passes Away
  The engineering professor helped design the Ford Mustang. Read article here.
• McCormick Becomes New Academic Home of the Center for Leadership. Read article here. Visit the Center for Leadership web site.
• Recruiter and Alum Robert Gariano (MSIT 2006) Speaks on the Right Way to Recruit CIOs. Read article here.
• Peter Dinda: Virtualization of Parallel Supercomputing Systems
  Peter Dinda was part of a collaboration between researchers at Northwestern University, Sandia National Labs and the University of New Mexico whose research has resulted in the largest scale study ever done on what many consider an important part of the future of computing — the virtualization of parallel supercomputing systems. Read more.
• 12/28/09 Wall Street Journal Article:  "Landing a Job of the Future Takes a Two-Track Mind". Read article here.
• Alok Choudhary was elected an ACM fellow, http://fellows.acm.org/.
• MSIT Professor gives talk in Toronto
  Yan Chen gave an invited talk entitled "NetShield: Matching with a Large Vulnerability Signature Ruleset for High Performance Network Defense" at the University of Toronto Networking Seminar in October 2009.
• Alok Choudhary Named John G. Searle Professor
  Alok Choudhary, professor and chair of the electrical engineering and computer science department in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and professor of technology industry management in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, has been named a John G. Searle Professor.  Read more.
• McCormick Engineering Celebrates 100 years!
  
• MSIT graduate Jibran Ilyas ('09) spoke for Defcon Skytalks on Friday, July 31, 2009 at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.
  Nicholas J. Percoco and Jibran Ilyas will present Malware Freak Show which will review the intricate details of three very interesting types of malware found during real-life forensics investigations. Ranging from simple to very complex, the malware discovered during these investigations are advanced portions of software written by very skilled developers.
  
  Trustwave's SpiderLabs has found that these skilled developers are shifting their attack vectors from broad attacks compromising as many targets as possible to targeted attacks against specific point-of-sale (POS) systems and specific environments. Despite the varying degrees of difficulty to implement the malware, the end result of each attack is the theft of confidential data leading to significant fraud and business loss for the organizations where it was found. These attack vectors are now categorized as cybercrime and the complexity in their propagation, control channels and data exporting properties will be discussed and demonstrated during the presentation.
  
  Jibran Ilyas will also present, Only the Ones Close to You Can Hurt You — How Computer Memory (RAM) Defies You, during DEFCON Skytalks. As a senior forensics investigator for Trustwave's SpiderLabs, Ilyas has seen first-hand a recent increase in memory attacks as hackers adapt their techniques to access more carefully protected data.
  
  Security controls, such as data encryption, are being widely adopted, causing attackers to shift their focus on extracting data from memory, which holds unencrypted data. Computer memory can enable attackers to potentially steal sensitive information from a target network and steal users' identity without much effort.
  
  With this technique, an attacker not only obtains the information keyed in at the victim computer, but also the information of the people with whom the victim interacts (e.g. a chat conversation can be recovered from the memory). Random Access Memory (RAM) dumps can also contain e-mails, contacts, browsed Web sites and other personally identifiable information. Ilyas will discuss the risks of unencrypted memory for businesses and regular users along with the available solutions.
  
  Link to Press Release: https://www.trustwave.com/pressReleases.php?n=SpdrDefcon
  Link to DEFCON Speaker Page: http://defcon.org/html/defcon-17/dc-17-speakers.html#Percoco
• MSIT Associate Director wins STAR Award.
  MSIT Associate Director, Trista Wdziekonski, was recently awarded the McCormick STAR Award for Spring Quarter. The McCormick STAR Leadership Award program provides a way to recognize individuals who demonstrate leadership and support of McCormick’s collaborative effort to achieve Excellence at All Levels. Congratulations to Trista on winning this award. See article.
• MSIT Tribune is featured on McCormick Engineering web site.
  A recent MSIT Tribune was featured on the McCormick School of Engineering website. Kris Hackney of SPSS, Inc., presented the topic: The Predictive Enterprise: Chicago Executive Tells How to Elevate Organizations to a New Level. Read article here.
• MSIT graduate Glenn Allison ('08) Featured in March Issue of Network World.
  Glenn Allison, Manager of Network Services at Grainger, was recognized in the March 2009 issue of Network World.  Glenn's team was able to reduce costs while also improving availability of the network.   See more here or download the PDF.
  
  
• MSIT graduate Bob Gariano co-authors book.
  Alum Bob Gariano (Class of  2006) recently co-authored a book, "Fundamental Talent," with Victoria Fine. It discusses how recruiting and retaining motivated and talented people is a differentiator in building shareholder value.  For more information, click here. 
• MSIT graduate Kelly Koenig puts her expertise in quantum nanotechnology to use battling identity theft.
  MSIT graduate Kelly Koenig was featured in the Chicago Sun-Times' January 17, 2009 Business section.
  
  
  
  
• Positioning Strategy Research Results from Marketing Professor Alex Chernev
  When designing products, companies often choose one of two positioning strategies. They can opt for a narrow, specialized positioning, whereby the product is presented as a master of one, characterized by a single feature. Alternatively, companies can choose a broad, all-in-one positioning, whereby the product is described as a jack of all trades, combining different attributes in an all-in-one solution. Which of these two positioning strategies works best? Click here for more.

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Events

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