Portfolio

The following is a collection of academic papers, projects, and presentations I’ve done during my undergraduate and graduate careers.  This isn’t a complete archive—I have avoided any group projects/assignments or take-home exams for example—but it should serve as a fairly representative look at my academic endeavors.  These are listed in something approximating reverse chronological order.

  • ICS 655 – An Introduction to Network Access Protection
    • December 2008
    • NAP is a set of Microsoft developed, Windows Server-based tools, applications, and policies for enforcing network security, user/system authentication, etc.  This sort of technology is more generally known as Network Access Control, and Microsoft’s NAP utilities and software are interoperable with many other NAC vendors’ hardware and software (e.g. Cisco’s NAC solutions).  This paper is a summary of Microsoft’s implementation as well as how it can interoperate with non-Windows clients such as Mac OSX and Linux, how it might be implemented, etc.
  • ICS 640 – Research Paper: Robert Noyce
    • November 2008
    • ICS 640 was a course on the history of the telecommunications industry.  One of the major assignments of the class was a research paper on a notable person in the industry, and I chose to research Mr. Noyce.  Robert Noyce, the proverbial “Mayor of Silicon Valley,” invented the integrated circuit, co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and made many other accomplishments during his career.
  • ICS 602 – Theory of Human Communication
    • November 2008
    • ICS 602 covers human communications in its various forms, and one of our tasks as students in the course is to develop our own personal definition of what exactly communication is.  Our exam in the class was to write this theory in a limited amount of time utilizing nothing more than a few quotations and diagrams.  It is an exercise in quick thinking, organization, and writing.
  • ICS 642 – Policy Analysis Report – Reducing Internet-Based Copyright Infringement
    • April 2008
    • The Policy Analysis Report is a policy paper each student writes outlining (and justifying) a particular telecommunications public policy issue.  Students are given great latitude in choosing the subject they will write on.  I chose U.S. copyright law as my general subject area with my PAR itself discussing strategies that might help reduce copyright infringement over the Internet (e.g. over peer-to-peer networks).
  • ICS 601 – Research Assignment “A” – Streaming Video
    • November 2007
    • The goal of this assignment was to do research on a given subject (streaming video in this instance) and write a paper summarizing the subject while also providing a ranking of providers of streaming video based on chosen criteria.
  • ICS 601 – Project “D” – Security
    • November 2007
    • As in the above assignment, students were given one of four subjects to write a short paper on.  Instead of ranking businesses, we were asked to suggest an area within our selected subject matter for a hypothetical venture capitalist to potentially invest in.  In this paper I discussed disaster recovery, encryption, and identity theft, eventually settling on identity theft protection as the investment option with the most potential out of these three.
  • CS 347 – Choosing the Right VPN (paper & presentation)
    • April 2007
    • Students were presented with a list of network security topics to research and write a short paper and give a presentation on.  I chose to cover Virtual Private Networks, and I had the specific aim of addressing the needs of the average user: someone at a hotel, coffee shop, or similar location who may not necessarily completely trust the network they happen to be connected to.
  • ISOM 317 – Research Paper: Chapter 6 – Local Area Network
    • October 2006
    • Each student in the class was assigned a chapter from our textbook to write a research paper on.  In my paper I discussed LAN technologies such as software & hardware firewalls, proxy servers, hubs, switches, wireless networks & Wi-Fi security, and general LAN security and design.