Jan 13
Jan 20 Jay Aslam
Title:
Cryptography and Steganography: The Science of Scrambling and Hiding Information
Description:
Cryptography is the science of scrambling information in such a way that it is unintelligible to an observer but recoverable by a designated recipient. Steganography is the science of hiding information information in such a way that it is undetectable by an observer but recoverable by a designated recipient. The history of cryptography and steganography will be discussed, and a number of cryptographic and steganographic techniques will be detailed. The applications of cryptography and steganography to such topics as e-commerce and digital watermarking will be described, and policy issues with respect to these topics will be discussed.
Possible projects and/or assignments:
1. Implement a simple substitution cipher.
2. Implement a simple least-significant bit steganographic technique
on a simple image format.
3. Short paper on policy issues related to cryptography/steganography.
4. Some simple calculations on the computational effort required to
break various cryptographic techniques via brute force. (Goal:
understand the relationship between computational effort and key size.)
Jan 27
Feb 3 Ravi Sundaram
Lectures
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1 - How the Internet works. Here we will go over the various technologies that form the Internet focusing primarily on network and application layers.
2 - How the Internet fails to work. We will discuss congestion collapse, denials of service, worms, viruses and content delivery networks.
Projects
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1. VoIP. What would happen if all telephone calls migrated to Internet. What would such a world look like? What are the benefits and disadvantages of this new world over what we have today?
2. Home networking. Consider a world in which every device is on the Internet from your washer/dryer/refrigerator to home entertainment systems and even photo and painting frames. What would such a world look like? What would be some security challenges in such a world?
Feb 10
Feb 17 Donghui Zhang
Topics: Database Design and Application Development
Project: Compare the sales of various relational DBMS (e.g. Oracle, SQL Server). Try to find such information for other types of DBMS as well (e.g. object-oriented DBMS). You can search such information from the web. For instance, relational DBMS comparison can be found at http://www4.gartner.com/resources/115000/115036/115036.pdf
Feb 24
Spring Break
Mar 2
Mar 9 Bob Futrelle
Each of Prof. Futrelle's talks will focus on systems developed primarily by undergraduates in our College, working under his direction. The work they did was excellent. One of the students published three papers about her work in 2003. One system deals with vectorization, the process of turning raster images (jpegs) into object collections. The other has to do with studying the natural language expressions scientists use in papers to "encapsulate" the information they're presenting. You will be able to study and try out the software yourself.
Details are beginning to appear at:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/futrelle/teaching/honorsSp04/
Mar 16
Mar 23 Richard Rasala
Java Power Tools
Mar 30 Student presentations
Apr 6 Student presentations
Apr 13 Student presentations