criminal justice program right across
campus, the alliance was a natural.
she says. "This program will allow us to
draw on other experts to educate security
professionals with the necessary range
of skills."
enough to know how to create a
technically secure network. You need
And if the system is breached, you need
to know how to track down the offender.
and the College of Criminal Justice are
joining forces to offer an interdisciplinary
MS degree program in information
assurance. Courses will begin this spring.
associate dean and director of graduate
programs, who spearheaded the effort to
create the new degree program. "If your
infrastructure is technically excellent but
not user-friendly, people won't use it.
All that technology is useless."
ratios. "There's no such thing as one
hundred percent secure," Chan says.
"A business has to decide how much risk
it is willing to take, and how much it is
not computer science questions. They
involve economics and business."
"Telecommunications and other high-tech
industries are governed by regulations,"
Chan says. While a computer scientist
might know how to get evidence about
who is committing a cyber crime, that
evidence may not be admissible in court.
"Criminal justice is concerned with
forensics--how to gather evidence and
trace criminal acts in the best way."
Center of Academic Excellence in
Information Assurance Education two
years ago, says she got the idea for the
interdisciplinary degree program from
attending information assurance confer-
ences and learning about other successful
initiatives. She says many computer sci-
ence programs team up with political
science, psychology, and law. Very few
have partners in law enforcement. With
coordinators for both disciplines, the
college curriculum committees, and the
University Undergraduate Curriculum
Committee. The program has to define
the dual degree requirements, include
one or more sample programs that take
into account when a student might enter
the program and what co-op division
will be required, and describe how the
co-op coordinators for the two disciplines
will coordinate the development and
supervision of the interdisciplinary
co-op assignments.
are attractive to the best students,"
Rasala says. "Having a broad array of
programs helps us continue to attract
strong students to the college."
dents a chance to increase their
skills and their competitiveness
three new dual majors to its curriculum
in the next year, bringing the total number
to seven.
expertise in a second discipline, and to
learn to apply computing to that disci-
pline," says Professor Richard Rasala,
associate dean and director of under-
graduate programs.
ment in fall 2005, include computer science
and biology, multimedia studies, and
music technology. In addition to these,
the college already offers dual degrees in
computer science and mathematics, cog-
nitive psychology, physics, and information
science. These programs have already
attracted almost seventy students.
visual arts, including graphic design,
animation, and photography.