Published: March 2015,  Issue: Vol. 27/No.3, Download as PDF

Archive of articles published in the March 2015, Vol. 27/No.3 issue.

2014 Taulbee Report Sneak Preview


The 2014 Taulbee Report will be published in the May 2015 issue of CRN. As we have done for the past few years, we’re providing a preview of the degree and enrollment numbers for bachelor’s and doctoral level programs in the departments responding to the survey.

G/rep{sec} = underrepresesented groups in security research


Three years ago in May 2012, as Terry Benzel, Deputy Director, Computer Networks Division, Information Sciences Institute at USC, Hilarie Orman, The Purple Streak (a software security firm), and I, Susan, then a visiting scholar at Harvard, sat at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, we had trouble seeing any other women. As women researchers in security and privacy of a certain age, we were accustomed to that. But we were not accustomed to the original proposal for the program committee for the following year’s program committee: forty men, two women. We looked at each other. There was not “world enough and time” to wait for the situation to change; we needed to take action now.

NSF and the National Big Data Initiative


Three years have passed since the launch in March 2012 of the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The breathtaking pace of activity in big data has continued unabated in the intervening years. In August 2014, Gartner declared that “big data” had passed the peak of the so-called “Hype Cycle.” This only means that the community can now roll up their collective sleeves and get to work on the real issues, rather than worrying about the hype!