Career Options day at FCIS

today I was in the FCIS-Ainshams – the school where I graduated in, and doing my post-graduate – and I had the good chance to attend an event organized by  the ACM called “Career Options”, it shows the students especially who are in their last year, what career paths they are going to have.

when I was first looking into the event agenda, I thought the academic career path session would be just a misery, because in real life the academic career path is the worst thing to go for as a FCIS graduate – at least in the first ten years – but it ends up being the best session in the event! and here is how.

Abdalla Gamal did a great presentation about it for the students, it was very inspiring for everyone, making a good thing out of a not good enough thing to go for – due to the research infrastructure we currently have in Egypt – I’ve blogged about this before in the research disaster around, check it out to see where exactly is the point.

the presentation was just great, the only comment here is, it didn’t answer what’s next question, okay I’m excited what’s next?, Abdalla was talking about the research and how to, but his presentation didn’t answer what concerns the students, what they have to do now to be engaged to this path, and are there any chances for them other than FCIS to start with? in my opinion this would just close the circle he has opened in his session.

you can download Abdalla’s presentation from here

the event was just great, great effort by all the ACMers and well done!

 

Technorati Tags: FCIS, Ain shams, ACM

Say no to WEP in your wireless network

if you started to read this post so properly you would have a wireless LAN in your home or office, so you will need to know the truth about the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), some of us know that it’s not secure enough but still don’t know why, and what would be the alternatives in case we didn’t use it!

The WEP has been designed to protect a wireless network from eavesdropping. however, it has significant vulnerabilities, and it’s dead couple years ago, but there are still some manufacturers supporting it in their products, last year I’ve published a paper about the security risks of 802.11 that illustrates the weakness of the WEP in details, you can download it from the following link:

 Security Risks of 802.11 – July 2006

 

Weak Encryption Protocol: WEP major flaw is its use of static encryption key, the encryption standard isn’t the problem, it uses RC4 to protect the confidentiality, however, every device uses “one key” to encrypt every transmitted packet, this means an average hacker using simple wireless hacking tools like aircrack or Linux BackTrack WEP cracking tools, eventually can figure out the key. 

 

Switching to WPA: there are several versions of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) available today, the easiest and the most widely supported version is the WPA Pre-Shared Key (WPA-PSK), you have to configure your router with a plain-text pass phrase between 8 and 63 characters long, using an encryption protocol called Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), WPA uses that pass phrase along with the network service set identifier (SSID) to generate unique encryption keys for each wireless client. Those encryption keys continuously change at the beginning of each transmitted frame. It’s not the most secure protocol but it’s much better than WEP and harder to break although I didn’t see any researcher has broken it yet. If you can use WPA2 (which uses AES) then use it. when it comes to security and encryption standards, using the latest standard is always a good thing.

 

Research disaster around

I believe the right diagnosing of the problem is the first block of the problem solution, we are not here to blame anyone or blog more about the Egyptian crisis, we will try to get to the crux of the problem, discuss, propose thoughtful solutions, exploring the challenges and see how could our generation roll out the research in Egypt.

 

First, we begin with the universities, everyone knows the teaching assistants misery inside the Egyptian universities, for who don’t know, I’ll explain it briefly, the teaching assistants are the brightest, and best hardworking students in any scientific schools in Egypt, none of these schools can support them financially where they could live a respectable life inside Egypt and also support them financially so they could uncover their innovative power into a touchable product or patents, and for your information some of them know this and some others don’t, their problem has lots of branches and consequences, we can discuss this story from stem to stem later. These good minds can’t find the fine place to grow and give anything back to the community as long as they can’t survive themselves! Ok, now let’s take a closer look on the potential legislation gaps,  I had a conversation couple days ago with Prof. Ahmed Hamad – one the most respected well-known professors  among the CIS schools – so I can figure out the following, the point behind it that there no motivations for professors to mentor and help the young researchers, after the professor completes his research set (individual and group researches) in its time limit s/he finds nothing more to do, and it leaves no choice except looking for outside business, and this shots the research in heart and head.

 

Where is our national strategic research plan?! 

The strategic orientation for the research projects is a must, the world now is widely open so you can research in whatever you want and you can easily find all the resources you would need, but this is not the matter, the matter is the set of fields where we should invest into, and suit our economical growth and push our current national developing plans. this should be defined by a high level authority that sets the strategic research plans which will also play some other roles, I know there is an entity playing this role but it’s not effective and it hasn’t the right culture and mindset to make a big moves toward the research strategic planning and deals with it as our nation final fight. A quick example: why should we invest our time and money on the wireless security?! There are many questions come up once we select a topic, how would this benefit our community? Our economy? Our industry? And if there is an answer for this, would we have the fund where we could compete the globe?!, this is not a pessimistic way to look at the things, in my opinion we should always push our time and money into our strategic fields where we could get the optimum revenue and inject our economical growth at this stage.

 

Where is our mentor?!

Everyone has to have a mentor, one of the greatest helpers and the connecting point between the community and the university is the Alumni Associations which we almost don’t have at all. These associations work on mentoring the fresh graduates and undergraduates, and settle them on the right track, which should be aligned with the national strategic plan. And it also guarantees the continuous assessment and training for our human capital.

 

So, I can summaries the problem into the following points:

• The human capital is not appropriately supported inside the Egyptian university
• No strategic planning for the research in the universities and research institutes, and so Egypt
• Almost no communication between the industrial entities and the university
• No available knowledge base for the needs of the social and industrial sectors in Egypt
• No strong Alumni Associations

One last closing fact to let you know how big the disaster is, the united sates issued an average of 495 patents every single day last year, and the entire region (Arab World) has granted a total of exactly 298 patents over the past eight years!! Imagine! It’s figure that speaks volumes about innovation..